The Second Amendment is treated as a sacred edict from the heavens
Jamila Bey asks some pointed questions about yesterday’s terrorist mass shooting in Alexandria.
The talk of mental illness is immediate when a white man takes up his arms and turns them against innocents. Despite that, the overwhelming majority of people who have mental illness never become violent, terroristic killers.
But even if we are to grant that this particular shooter in the Alexandria incident did suffer from mental illness, there is still a main question to be answered. And it should be laid at the feet of Scalise and his similar-voting colleagues on Capitol Hill. We have to ask legislators, “Can we talk about protecting Americans from the proven threat that is domestic terror?”
Scalise holds an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association. He also was on Donald Trump’s Second Amendment Coalition, which wants to make it easier for residents of the District of Columbia to obtain guns. He has also fought to do away with provisions restricting mentally ill people from buying guns. Scalise co-sponsored the Firearms Interstate Commerce Reform Act, which aimed to remove restrictions on interstate firearms transactions.
While the Second Amendment is treated as a sacred edict from the heavens, never to be touched, these are legislators who are happy to change laws about voting rights, equal access to women’s health care and mental-health care as well.
Why is that? It’s hard not to think it must be because at bottom enough people want it to go on being possible to shoot people with ease.
These legislators, and much of the media, too, are far too comfortable with the status quo that white men with guns are the prime illustration of what it is to be an American—no matter on whom they turn those weapons.
It was almost a year ago when GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted:
.@Judgenap: Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 23, 2016
Paul was uninjured Wednesday as he and other legislators fled the hail of gunfire while another lone-wolf white man with a gun unleashed his fury at unarmed people who couldn’t defend themselves.
It’s time to do more than wring our hands and talk about how futile it is to even make a request for a real conversation about this issue.
Congress must absolutely get in line with medical professionals, who explain that gun violence is a public health issue, just like clean water and safe food.
And we must all do a better job in calling a terrorist a terrorist. Even if he’s a “normal looking” white man.
No one, not even GOP legislators, should be scared of being shot down in the outfield.
Will this nudge Republicans into a different view of the Second Amendment? I’d love to think so, but I doubt it.
If they don’t they’ll get shot again.
Guns can’t defend against gun; only breaking line of sight does that.
“gun violence is a public health issue, just like clean water and safe food.”
HAHAHAHAHA!!
Too late. Clean water and safe food are frivolous nuisances maintained by red tape and regulations that have been waved away by this administration. Making America great (again) seems to involve a lot of people being unwell, sick or dead even without meaningful gun control.
Well, we have here an instance of someone using their firearms to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical. The response of the tyrannical government isn’t to roll over. It isn’t even to consider fewer guns, less ammunition, lower rates of fire, or background checks – or to consider that it may BE a tyrannical government, that has incited violence, flouted the rule of law, mocked the will of the majority, and generally left people understandably dubious about means of relief short of retaliatory violence.
No, it’s been more guns, more more, everywhere, plus tone-trolling the left. I don’t think they even mind political violence, so long as they’ve got more of it than the other side does – which is almost certain, given that the vast majority on this side abhor it utterly.
Surely another purpose of the Second Amendment was to arm White men against a slave uprising, or revolutionary workers, not just against the possibility of a tyrannical government. The successful Haitian slave rebellion must have scared the bejeezus out of the US slave-owning ruling class.
The idea that a citizens’ militia could successfully prevail over a modern hi-techn army is simply ridiculous, What the gun loonies fear is probably not the US government, because it appears to be in conservative hands, but the possibility of insurrection.
Hmm. I don’t think the fears of insurgency loomed large until later. In the 18th century the slave population wasn’t that large yet; the boom came with the settlement of the cotton lands in the Mississippi Delta.
It’s still a plausible argument that fears of insurgency in later years reinforced the White love affair with the Second Amendment, isn’t it?
I wonder if the increase in the slave population was a result of the end of the transportation of British convicts to the US.
Yes, yes it is. Especially, of course, post-Civil War.
The increase in the slave population started with the end of the slave trade, and continued when slavery became more a matter of profit than of local farming. Big cash crops needed a lot of labor.
@RJW Interesting article on the subject here:
http://www.theroot.com/2nd-amendment-passed-to-protect-slavery-no-1790894965
Lady Modegreen,
Thanks, very interesting.
I don’t understand how posturing with firearms will protect citizens from possible modern tyrannies which would rule by misinformation rather than force of arms.
It doesn’t. It couldn’t. And it’s not the purpose – it’s part of a myth.
The guns are a sacred fetish object. Possession and adoration of them define a social group, a tribe, and that identity defines an outgroup: the unarmed, the gun-haters, the ones who may want to take your guns. Affirming gun-love is an easy way to get the backing of the gun-tribe; making the other out as a gun-hater puts the gun-tribe in opposition to them on a visceral, unthinking level. Questioning unlimited firearm possession by anyone anywhere is effectively blasphemy.
A gun-tribe – particularly with the posturing with the weapons – is inherently threatening too, so anyone outside the gun-tribe is put off balance and intimidated. Making out the opposition to it as being on the side of tyranny (!) even starts the rhetoric on the gun-tribe’s advantage, over and above the implicit appeal to force they’ve got going on.
And it makes actual political violence an easy step. Bundy occupiers and despoilers of public lands are already armed and familiar with their weapons. Abortion providers need bullet-proof vests particularly – bullet-proof full body protection would be better. “The Second Amendment people” stand ready for assassination attempts on behalf of their candidate for president, and the opposition is only what is left after people realistically afraid for their lives bow out.
It’s not a precision instrument of political action; in effect, the Alexandria shooting was a misfire. But that will happen now and then playing with deadly weapons.
Right after the Revolution, incidents like Shay’s Rebellion and the Whisky Rebellion forced the government to address the need for a standing force. The second amendment needs to be seen as a sort of conscription-lite.
The words ‘well regulated militia’ seem to have been erased from the Republican conscience.
Could the enshrinement of firearms possession also be construed as a bulwark against Native American resistance to white expropriation and extermination? IIRC, fearsof Native Americans was stoked in the time leading up to the War of 1812, which also saw further white, American encroachment spreading westward, away from the priginal territory of the Thirteen Colonies.
@10 Jeff Engel
The gun lovers seem more like wannabe warlords than ideologues, very disturbing.
I’m a former firearms owner, btw, my wife and I owned a farm in SE Australia, guns were simply tools of trade. When I sold the farm I sold my rifle. Luckily Australia doesn’t have an equivalent of the Second Amendment.
Am I right in thinking that a CDC investigate of gun crime was suppressed by the Bush administration? (I think Shrub, but I’m not sure).
Yes – that is, the CDC was forbidden to make the data public. I remember blogging it at the time.
[Googles] Ah except it wasn’t Bush, it was Congress.
July 2015:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends-ban-cdc-research-gun-violence