The Second Amendment should be reinterpreted to protect the rights of states to protect themselves with well-regulated militias. Home protection should be done with nonlethal weaponry. Hunting should be permissible in designated hunting zones with weapons provided on the hunting grounds. But most importantly, the Second Amendment in its current form should be eliminated, private gun ownership should be eliminated and local police departments should be disarmed.
Those who wield power over others are susceptible to moral infringements as their authority can often change the nature of their everyday behaviors. Police officers who wield immeasurable levels of power over the civilian population become akin to occupational military forces in the towns and cities that they patrol. The abuses of power are prevalent in all professions, but very few professions wield the same levels of power as police officers. People can be fallible to the corruption of power; therefore, it is important to arm these “domestic servants” with nonlethal firearms so that when the inevitable moral infringements and power corruptions occur, civilians will not face public servants armed with lethal fire power.
Legally purchased firearms are more likely to kill a family member than a perpetrator. The argument revolving around home protection is a fallacy. Those who truly care about protecting their loved ones would actually be safer keeping a gun away from the home entirely. When someone brings an instrument of death into their household, the statistics show increases in domestic violence, suicides and accidents with children. Compared to other developed nations, an American child between the ages of 5 to 14 is 11 times more likely to be the victim of an accidental gun death with a legally purchased firearm. In 2010, an estimated 19,392 people commit suicide with a legally purchased firearm. Every month, 52 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner with a legally purchased firearm.
The Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment as a fail-safe apparatus in case their democratic experiment was ever threatened by the forces of absolutism. The assumption by anti-government type people in America today that believe that simply because they are fighting against the “establishment” or “the man” that somehow that puts them on the side of moral righteousness. This is a false notion. The argument that Americans need guns because they are going to someday overthrow their tyrannical government is a flawed perspective, because the truth is that the tyranny could very well be coming from the people trying to overthrow their government.
It is not unwarranted to say that the U.S. government may someday fall to the perils of autocracy. Legal scholars have varying interpretations of the Second Amendment. Constitutional analysts theorize that: “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,” is not an approbation of private gun ownership. It is the proposed acquiescence of all states to maintain armies that could oppose government oppression. Even with a broad restructuring of the second amendment, the Founding Fathers desire to have a fail-safe against rising tyrannies would lay intact.
These would be difficult policies to pass in the United States, where gun ownership is often equated as the cornerstone of America’s foundations of freedom and liberty. This nation was founded with the Second Amendment. 243 years of private gun ownership cannot be erased.
But despite the popularity of firearms, Americans will one day tire of living in a culture of fear — the fear that they encounter every time they step into a movie theater and the lights dim. There is a culture of fear in America that university students suffering from depression or mental disorders can easily obtain firearms. This fear stretches into grade school classrooms where some students are socially awkward, and many worry that these young, troubled adolescents will find access to firearms. It ruins the escapism element of movie going when every American is always subconsciously worried that violent movies are bound to inspire acts of real world violence. People who support gun ownership argue that it stands as a testament to freedom and liberty, but there is nothing liberating about living in fear in your own country.
The Second Amendment infringes upon every American’s right to a safe and peaceful coexistence. Nobody who claims to cherish life can so blatantly uphold a weapon of death. The Founding Fathers endowed us with inalienable rights, but being scared all the time was not one of them. People are not being ordained with a life of liberty and happiness when every troubled person can too easily put that angry behind the barrel of a gun. America is not living up to the legacy of its Founding Fathers. A culture of fear and constant terror is not freedom, it’s a prison that stretches two oceans.
