Kudos to Alex Cuthbertson for demonstrating how wrong it is to have a gun in his column (“Long live the gun” March 14). Big bad sinister things that they are in the hands of a decaying society that has children romping about putting their grubby, little fingers around anything black, shiny and metallic.
Because some kid goes haywire because he’s been taunted and abused his whole life, the gun’s to blame. Maybe that’s because an angry kid waving around his lunch box isn’t considered much of a threat. Sure, the gun helped him do it. Even though we got the kid, damn it, the gun and all its kind still have to pay.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with a happier, more sedate, unarmed population. If we got rid of guns, we could walk around greeting strangers and skipping to work. All of our problems would be gone, vanished along with that monstrous creation. Maybe Cuthbertson would even pass out the yellow daisies.
I’m with Cuthbertson. Screw the Constitution. The Second Amendment was never meant to be taken seriously anyway. Apparently no one has a God-given right to defend themselves, rise up against tyranny, or put some control back into their own lives. I’m not sure where exactly our society gets the right to force us to disarm, but I’m sure we could legitimize it somehow.
Okay, so I lied. I’m not actually with Cuthbertson. I think he’s ridiculous. The gun isn’t the substitute for low egos and emasculating physiques. It bestows power on its holder. That’s what it comes down to. People are much more powerful holding the gun than without it. And correspondingly, people get a lot less powerful staring into the muzzle of that gun. The right to wield that power, responsibly and legally, belongs to ordinary civilians.
Sure, there are other reasons to have guns, like hunting. I personally don’t hunt, and I’m a lot less convinced of the utility of a gun when it’s an animal staring into that muzzle. I won’t dwell on hunter’s rights, and I won’t parade them as my justification to own a gun.
Too many school shootings have occurred. That’s true. It would be a lie to say that if guns weren’t easily available, the attacks probably would have still occurred and that the kids would have used wooden sticks or heavy rocks and gone on their rampage anyway. The guns gave them a solution. Other, more easily ignored factors gave them a convenient problem to that solution, and then kids ended up dying.
“Get rid of the guns,” scream the anti-gun lobbyists, “and you save lives!”
Flower-power to the rescue! Take away some of the most important rights people have ever had, and bullies can once more wear bright colors to school. We are the good people of society. We are not meant to possess anything dangerous. We can take the initiative to decontaminate our lives of everything with deadly potential, like cars, electricity and bridges, before some bad media coverage forces our government to ban that too.
The media is what bugs me about this. Their message has never been to lock your gun up and hide the key from your deranged kids. In every news story, their opening line is to fear going to school because you may be the next target. Then every high school conducts its own little raid for who’s been talking trash about classes because, hey, he could be the next one headlining the newspapers.
It doesn’t take long for Cuthbertson and his kind to come out and insist that owning guns is for the macho-ists and the militias. They claim that good, honest, hard-working people don’t need guns. It doesn’t matter to them that society is made up of free, independent people, who agree to give up a lot to form great nations, but who yet hold strong to some of their most basic rights, among those being the right to bear arms.
Guns may be a part of the problem, but banning them is hardly a solution because there are good reasons to have guns. No one has the right, in our society, to force others to give up their weapons (aside from the constraints on felons, minors and assorted misanthropes).
It would help little to conjure up scary scenarios where guns save the day. Importantly, they’re a part of the foundation that supports our civil rights. I’d hate to see that shot down.
Ronny Carny School of Law ’02
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