A Word or Two About a 2nd Amendment Remedy

During the recent senate campaign in Nevada, Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle, freely talked about a 2nd Amendment remedy for political disagreement with a Democrat incumbent. Yesterday in Tucson, Arizona, Americans got to see a 2nd Amendment remedy in action, and that statement applies even if the crazed shooter wasn’t politically motivated because the 2nd Amendment covers every situation where a gun is involved.

I’ve always been wary and skeptical of people who worship documents. I try to avoid people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the Koran, and I even feel uncomfortable in the company of people who accept the perfection of the U.S. Constitution. I think that the framers of our Constitution, the Founding Fathers of our nation, were brilliant and principled men— but they weren’t fortune tellers. When they wrote the 2nd Amendment, they could never have foreseen a world where amoral and mentally-deficient people can easily arm themselves with devastating automatic weapons, and then network with other unhinged minds over the Internet to gin up each other into a mass frenzy of ideological hatred. The Founding Fathers would have seen this scenario as a recurrent and structural recipe for disaster. They might still have made gun ownership legal, but they would not have enshrined gun ownership into a sacred constitutional right.