THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: ARE SOME RIGHTS NO LONGER RIGHTS?

THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: ARE SOME RIGHTS NO LONGER RIGHTS?

What is guaranteed to us in the U. S. Constitution and its amendments—including what we call the Bill of Rights—is sacrosanct, supposedly. But the Preamble says that “all men are created equal”—and we needed a presidential proclamation, three Constitutional amendments, and the passage of civil rights legislation to get that equality defined. It wasn’t that we decided that the Founding Fathers—many of them slave-owners—intended to make black people or women “equal” from the beginning; we knew and know full well that they didn’t. So what we said, to begin to make racial or sexual discrimination illegal, was either that the Founding Fathers should have intended equality for men of all races and both sexes from the beginning, or that times—and our thinking, our understanding—had changed .

In 1920 we passed and ratified an amendment to the U. S. Constitution which wasn’t really an amendment but an addition: the Constitution didn’t mention alcohol in any way. But we banned its consumption—until we passed and ratified another amendment, thirteen years later, making alcoholic beverages legal again.

Did the Founding Fathers intend, when they drew up the Second Amendment, to give each of us the right to own a gun? Probably so, given the times. But maybe they only meant to authorize the arming of a properly created and authorized militia. Since we can’t determine which it was, we turn—as we have in the past—to what the right thing seems for the present.

The justification for prohibition was the harm alcohol did in our society, not that drinking was sinful. Dancing and bingo and divorce might have been prohibited as “sinful,” but never were. (Nor—despite what Justice Scalia has written—are there laws prohibiting masturbation.) But the harm to society that Americans perceived as attributable to alcohol led us to ratify a constitutional amendment prohibiting its consumption. When the amendment was repealed, it was because prohibition was harming our society—or the society of enough of us—more than alcohol had done.

The justification for making hand-guns and assault rifles illegal, without registration and permission, is that unrestricted private gun-ownership results in much bloodshed in this country every day. Our violence is destroying us. It’s not a matter of whether the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee to each of us the right to own and carry—“keep and bear”—guns; and we don’t need to argue that the authors of the Bill of Rights wanted only militiamen to have the right to such. Today, in America, we can’t afford to have everybody carrying guns, owning pistols and AK-47s and Ouzis.

We need to ban unregistered, unlicensed guns. Whatever the Supreme Court does in the current Washington, D.C. case, Congress needs either to enact legislation or to pass an amendment to the Constitution, explicitly limiting the extent of the right to bear arms established in the second amendment.

Bert Hornback 20 March 2008

Economics, or How we do things at home.

The television news personality reads what the prompter says: we must achieve a "balance between environmental concerns and the need for economic growth."

That's a statement created by the mantra-makers whose copyrights also include "God Bless America." Let me translate: "neither the life of this earth nor life on this earth is more important than making money." That's what it says. That's what we read and hear every day.

Suppose we answer: "Okay. You say the world can't have economic growth without environmental damage. We don't agree--but we will accept it, provided you accept as a corollary that the world can't survive continued and continuous economic growth."

Or what is called economic growth. Economics is a word we get from the ancient Greeks: oikonomikos. Oikos means home, and nomos means culture, so that oikonomikos means something like "how we do things at home."

At home, we all work together in order to survive. We share what we have; we are a commonwealth. That's good economics.

But if what is called "economic growth" means that we can't have a home, whether as a result of the current mortgage brokers' greed or because we have killed our planet, then we should reject the idea that our environment and economic growth are of equal value.

If our environmental health isn't more important that what is called economic gain, we will discover--soon enough--that we have chosen death over life. Economic growth is a lot like cancer--which is a disease that eats cells, and eats cells, and doesn't know how to stop. Cancer is greedy--and eventually it kills its host, and thereby kills itself.

I remember when, in the 1970s, the CEO at Chrysler Corportation said at a press conference, in response to a question about pollution, "Americans can't afford clean air." At least people scorned him, laughed at his stupidity. Now the people who talk about the need for a"balance between environmental concerns and the need for economic growth" are pundits.

Which reminds me: Wolff Blitzer keeps advertising his CNN "team" as the best journalists in the business. He also tells us that CNN offers "an American perspective on the U. S. Elections."
How do Europeans respond to this astounding news?

1. Is there anybody who doesn't understand that?

2. Which American perspective does CNN represent? It certainly isn't mine!

3. Everybody--in Europe, anyway--has long understood that CNN is a tool of the U.S. government and of U. S. industry.

Bert
14 March 2008