Las Vegas Shooting and the 2nd Amendment
I don't have much to write about the recent atrocity in Las Vegas where a wealthy semi-retired real estate investor and gambler shot hundreds of people at a country music festival. Stephen Paddock murdered 58 people and wounded over 400. Likely many of the survivors will have lifelong issues. It's a horror. No one yet knows his motive. From the information released to the public, it appears that Paddock used bump stocks to increase the rate of fire of his weapons. Bump stocks are legal devices which redirect the gun's recoil to make a semi-automatic weapon behave somewhat similarly to an automatic weapon. Automatic weapons made after 1986 are of course banned for civilian usage. Those made prior to that time are legal but only with strict government oversight.
In the wake of the atrocity many people who were generally already pro-gun control were greatly outraged. They called for more gun control: bans on bump stocks, bans on semi-automatic rifles, increased fees, taxes and insurance on gun owners, limits on the number of weapons or ammunition any one man could purchase, warrantless searches of gun owners' homes, medical sign off to own a gun, lawsuits against the NRA or gun manufacturers, profiling of white men, registering of all guns nationwide, confiscation of all guns except for police or military use, and the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.
Whether or not you or I think that any of that is a good idea is almost beside the point. Give or take there are somewhere between 275-300 million guns in private hands. That's almost as many guns as people that are in America. Gun owners aren't going to give those up. Are you willing to go take them? You had better bring some friends if that is your intention. And if you thought prohibition of alcohol worked out well then I guess you would love prohibition of guns.
Amending the constitution requires 2/3 of the House and Senate to agree AND 3/4 of the states. Or to put it more simply if just 13 states disagree with rewriting the Constitution, it can't be done. Which states might oppose rewriting or eliminating the 2nd Amendment? Well for sure I think that Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota would oppose that move. That's 12 right there. Throw in just one more state-say Florida or Montana or Wyoming or Arizona or Indiana or Michigan and that ends any talk of repealing the 2nd Amendment. It's usually at this point that people who want to repeal the 2nd Amendment become even more insulting and condescending to their opponents. They bemoan the fact the states which are sparsely populated or worse, populated with the wrong kind of people, have just as much say in this process as states with larger or in their view more intelligent sorts of people.
Well that's too bad. That's the system we have. We have an individual right to own weapons. That doesn't mean the weapons can't be regulated or that specifically horrific ones can't be outlawed. But the idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment or banning all semi-automatics is a non-starter. The only sort of gun control which is politically possible is gun control at the state level. Some people might not like that but short of a sudden massive demographic change or an out and out civil war, that's how it's going to be. Guns are for better or worse, a part of American culture and civic religion.
