The Fallacy of American Gun Ownership Rights
Today, the day after Christmas, I was heartened to see guns being turned in at a voluntary program in Los Angeles. It's certainly a step in the right direction. As is the public gun registry this article describes. It's a new age, and the internet has opened lots of homes to public view in real estate sites and ads. Gun owners don't need more protection than homeowners selling their homes or people taking exercise walks outside.
Speaking to other American women at my exercise class this morning, I heard differing points of view about the problem with guns today in America: one woman thought we should each be forced to take care of a German Shepherd dog, one for each household, and not have guns at all. Another, a lawyer, claimed that people in poor communities should be allowed to arm themselves, hunters have the right to have guns--it's a right to own guns under the Second Amendment--but doesn't think assault rifles are necessary.
Based on having lived in peaceful countries before I moved to America, my views that guns should not be in homes, and that most people don't have any need to own guns--whose only purpose is to intimidate, injure, and kill--is considered by most Americans rash, unwise, crazy and frankly stupid.
Piers Morgan Under Fire
I feel sorry for Piers Morgan having around 93,000 75,000 signatures on a deportation petition, growing and subject to updating, a petition that requires only 25,000 to get an official White House response. All those stone cold, unattractive, deeply inhospitable signers had to log in to sign. I would say, judging from first names alone on the petition, for every female name there are twelve to twenty male names.
Meanwhile, the ladies at my exercise class claim that Piers Morgan shouldn't have put out his own views. That was his so-called mistake, not his actual views, that he should have instead had a guest to argue with the pro-gun lobbyists and left it to a guest to fight with the other side the way he did....But that stance, of blaming a television journalist--the messenger of truth to power and a mouthpiece of the officially unrepresented opposition--defies logic and common sense. Journalists choose the news to tell, so their personal views inevitably gain more visibility. (This is the unstated rationale behind the Republican voice of Fox News). The extent of the vitriol and anger resulting from his frank expression of logic is chilling to me.
Americans can sound wild, crazy, heartless, inhospitable, non-supportive of one another, and not at all free to me when they talk about wanting and liking their guns, and throwing out of the country those who disagree. The fact that a commenter on a website said that the CNN announcer's fate should be similar to the Nazis deported from America in the Second World War is scary.
It shows that it was possible at some point in the past to throw out someone because of their beliefs (just as beliefs were considered when they entered America--a point I find disturbingly unconstitutional if it comes to that, and it obviously does). Even beliefs sanctioned by international organizations of world peace about gun rights are considered irrelevant and not worth following to Americans.
Americans threw out Nazis, and so they're attempting to throw out anti-gun supporters. Haven't they noticed that the guns Americans use to kill each other could kill them? That they would seem to every other country as deeply unattractive and inhospitable? Why would anyone bother being a tourist to the country?
The Second Amendment Again
Let's get serious. Gun ownership is not a right in any part of the Second Amendment. As my previous post shows, legal scholars such as Saul Cornell et al. have discovered this as a fact despite dogma to the contrary espoused by pro-gun advocates, even pro-gun lawyers and legal educators. That gun ownership is thought to be a Second Amendment right is a phony but popular assertion promoted by the gun lobby to sell and own guns designed to intimidate, injure and kill "the enemy among us." And Americans obviously have many enemies within the country. The internal death, intimidation, and injury-by-gun rate is the highest in the world by a ratio of many thousands to one among the civilized countries.
If only most Americans were more civilized, educated, more refined, more experienced of life lived outside of America in a kinder, gentler world, they might not be delusional and just plain wrong about the Second Amendment. They don't have the knowledge, experience, or the right to tell others in the world how to live, and my gentle readers outside of America shouldn't listen to the insular, provincial brand of American bluster, given the uniquely high American murder rate.
Defending oneself by following the path of gun ownership has not worked, as many commenters have written, those who've experienced firsthand violent threats of gun violence. The fact that self-defense with a gun has worked in a few cases doesn't mean that it has worked in the majority of cases. I find the assertion simply undocumented, inimical to peace, anti-civilization, and anti-humanity.