This is a think-piece.  I hope that it will inspire you to think about its subject matter. Please approach it with an open mind.

Hello World!  I’m going to take a moment to discuss Gun Culture and the Second Amendment.

I went to bed one night in 2019 thinking about a recent shooting in El Paso, Texas that left 22 people dead.  I woke up the following morning to news of another shooting in Dayton, Ohio that left 9 people dead.  I’d become numb to mass shootings, but that weekend was different.  I couldn’t recall a time in my life where two high profile mass shootings occurred within 36 hours of each other.  I also came across several images on social media discussing U.S. gun laws and the 2^nd Amendment.

To provide more context, mass shootings are any shooting in which four or more people are shot.  The United States had had 255 mass shootings in 217 days by the time the news of Dayton broke.  Every year, the United states has, on average, six times as many mass shootings as the rest of the world.  We have had 20 cases where four or more people have died from gun violence in a single incident.  It goes without saying that we have a gun problem in this country, and we need to talk about it. 

So, let’s talk about it…

I don’t want to eliminate guns in the United States.

First, I want to make this clear.  I don’t want to take away people’s guns. At least not most of them.  I do want to put a greater emphasis on responsible use of guns and accountability for those who own them. 

It seems rather easy to claim that we should do away with the 2^nd Amendment and ban all guns.  It’s easy for me to say that we don’t need or even want guns.  I have lived in urban and suburban areas my entire life.  Emergency services are usually a phone call and a 2-minute drive away.  I do not trust the police to help me in an emergency, but I can reasonably expect a rapid response.

For much of the U.S., however, help may be much further than 2-minutes away.  This country is much less condensed than many of the countries that have stricter gun laws.  In this country, you might be quite isolated from the rest of civilization.  You might not be able to count on help to show up.  If you live in a part of the country that has a certain reputation, you might not be able to count on the police to care.  In those situations, you might have to protect yourself, and this suburban boy ain’t about to tell you that you can’t use a gun to do so.

But, we can’t have the Wild West in the 21^st century.  If only there was some way to make the country safer while letting people have their guns…

I would like for guns to be more well-regulated.

The 2^nd amendment reads as follows:

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

There have been many arguments about this statement. Are individuals allowed to have guns or are states allowed to have militias?  In 2008, the Supreme Court sided with the individual right to own a gun (for home defense).  So, let’s go with that interpretation since it is the most recent.

This is not a blanket ruling for all guns.  This does not mean that I should be able to walk into any Walmart and buy up a bunch of guns without a background check.  This does not mean that I am allowed to have high capacity magazines or “semi” automatic rifles.  It doesn’t even mean that I am allowed to take my gun out of my house.  All this means is that it is my constitutional right to own a gun IN my house. 

But this doesn’t really make anyone happy.  It’s reasonable to be concerned about guns becoming over-regulated. We currently do not have a constitutional right to carry our guns out in public.  That’s left up to the individual states.  There is also nothing protecting us if the government decides to take away all the guns and hand us a single shot government issued pistol.  After all, we will have our gun in our houses for “self-defense”.  That’s all we are constitutionally allowed to have.

It's also reasonable to be mad about the current lack of regulation.  There’s currently nothing stopping someone from walking into a gun store and buying a bunch of guns with high-capacity magazines. 

So, this has been proposed before, but I’m going to propose it again.  Let’s regulate guns how we regulate cars. We need a license to operate a car. We have to go to car safety educational courses before we can get our license. We have to use cars that are "street legal". If someone breaks the law using our car, we are held responsible unless we report it stolen. Our car is usually registered with the government. Failure to register our cars with the government can be detrimental. Failure to register ourselves as a car owners and users can be detrimental. And lastly, if we fail to be a responsible car owner we run the risk of losing your right to own a car.

Now replace all the instances of car in that last paragraph with "gun", and you'll understand how I would change our gun laws. 

And yes, I would propose that this legislature be part of a constitutional amendment. This new amendment would functionally overrule and repeal the 2nd amendment. It would then replace it with what I have proposed above. We have amended and repealed other amendments before, so there is a precedent.

And I’d argue that it’s our moral duty to make the country as safe as possible for all people. 

We should care that gun violence is disproportionately high in this country.

Guns are about as American as Cowboys, Big Macs, Capitalism, Bigotry, and the military industrial complex.  Someone once compared American gun culture to the smog in Beijing.  Everyone knows it’s killing us, but we just accept is as a fact of life.   

I’ve even seen posts alleging that the gun debate “ended with Sandy Hook”.  That the debate is finished if we are willing to watch someone murder a class of elementary school students and do nothing about it.  But the debate is never finished.  We should care that people are dying, and many do still care.  The debate ends when the problem has ended.  We will keep calling out politicians who stand by and send their “thoughts and prayers”.  We will continue to protest. 

We have to do something, even if it involves changing who we are as a country.  Change doesn’t come fast and it doesn’t come easy, but it is inevitable.

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