As with our barbarous system of payment for healthcare, I find the American view of gun control strange, foreign, bizarre, even unholy.
And I say unholy even as an agnostic. But I do believe in something like holiness, meaning purity, sanctity….just reasonability will do.
Now that the pandemic is over, the mass shootings have picked up right where they left off. For the record, I am writing this one right after the Indianapolis massacre that claimed eight lives. I think I read the shooter was 19.
Nineteen.
Anyway…
I am not interested in rehashing the Constitution. All I will say is it heavily implies that if you want to keep and bear arms, then you must be in a well regulated militia. Meaning this kid would have had a sergeant breathing down his neck, who in turn would have had a lieutenant, who would have had a captain, and so on through major and colonel and general.
But no…we’ve just excised that whole militia part, and just settled for “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed” as if the entire network of quasi-military oversight never existed.
Frankly, I am bored by this debate. I hate it. It makes so little sense to any human of reasonable senses, it shouldn’t even have to be put forth: but here we go: we need to control the sale of weapons in this country. And ammunition.
Ammunition is the real key. Yes, there are — I am not bothering to look this up — something like hundreds of millions of firearms in this country. So yeah, harvesting them all in some kind of buyback program, is likely a pipedream.
But hey — here is something we can do in the meantime. Make ammo cost an arm and a leg. Make every fucking bullet count. Tax the shit out of each one of them.
As Chris Rock said, paraphrasing here, ‘if every bullet cost $400, all of a sudden, there won’t be no innocent bystanders.’”
At bare minimum. Let’s start with that. Tax the fuck out of bullets. Put the proceeds toward treating innocent gunshot victims, like children and oblivious bystanders. And then let’s go from there towards treating the causes of these senseless outbreaks of murdering strangers.
I agree. If you are one of these "original intent" folks, all you have to do is look up early writings on the subject and there is nary a mention of guns and self defense. It's all about well-regulated militias.
Yep and maybe limit quantity of ammo also. It'll take years to go through all the supply built up but it would also make people think, at least maybe it would.