A Blot on Our Record

A Blot On Our Record

I’m Proud to be an American.

We hear it everyday. As if it is some national motto, the phrase flows off the tongues of songwriters, politicians, media members, and “regular folk” on a daily basis with little thought as to its meaning. Well call me “anti-American” but I cannot get myself to join in the chorus. In fact, I write today as an American citizen embarrassed by my country.

Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful to have grown up in the United States. The “problems” we face on a daily basis pale in comparison to the real problems faced by those less fortunate than us around the world and that peace and relative security gives us the privilege of being able to focus on education, self-improvement, and innovation like no other set of people on Earth.

But I am not proud to be an American. Our country has it all and yet, because of words written by a group of wig-wearing racists over 200 years ago, we have kept ourselves from taking action on the growing problem of gun violence that has turned mass shooting from “story of the year” to a normal part of the daily news cycle.

The United States Constitution is a marvelous piece of political doctrine. It has established a system of government “by the people” that has yet to be truly rivaled in its 200-plus years of existence and has allowed the nation to become a beacon of freedom and prosperity the rest of the world continuously seeks to replicate.

But there is a part of that great document that has prevented the United States from truly reaching its potential and has left the rest of the world shaking its head in disbelief: the 2^nd Amendment.

Now, I don’t want this to be a treatise on constitutional interpretation. Personally, I believe the 2^nd Amendment does not provide the “right to bear arms” that it has commonly been thought to stand for and instead merely authorizes the creation of state militia to complement and counteract the potential power of a federal military (go ahead, read the damn thing before you disagree).

But for the sake of argument, I will just allow the popular notion to stand in place of reality and go along with the concept that a “right to bear arms” is guaranteed by the 2^nd Amendment. Now the question becomes: So what?

The Constitution, as it was originally written, was not a perfect document. If it was, there would have been no need for the 27 amendment passed, at great political difficulty, to it during the intervening 220-something years.

Take, for example, the protections given to slave owners. Many of the “founding fathers” whose word we are supposed to take as impermeable were themselves owners of many slaves. In fact, the great Thomas Jefferson had several affairs with (rapes of?) slaves he owned and despite supposedly wishing for his slaves to be freed by the law, did little to exercise his immense power both as an owner and as a politician in order to make that desire a reality.

This misguided belief in the righteousness of slavery necessitated the passing of the 13^th (and 14^th) Amendment in the wake of the Civil War. Recognizing that slavery was a blemish on the record of our country and seeking to better our society both morally and economically, the post-war Congress led the charge to eliminate a glaring hole in the “all men are created equal” premise upon which the Republic was supposedly founded.

Amendments themselves have also been subject to repeal over the course of American history. The 18^th Amendment, establishing prohibition, was repealed just 14 years later in the 21^st Amendment not because of some massive shift in society’s views on the morality and efficacy of intoxicating beverages, but rather after the nation began coming to the realization that prohibition led to more harm than good.

Today, we have a similar situation and it comes to us in large part thanks to the common interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment. Those who have interpreted that Amendment to stand for the “right to bear arms” often hold that such a guarantee was designed to protect the people from the power of the federal government. Assuming that was in fact the case, the Amendment is clearly outdated. Though there are legitimate concerns to be had about the scope of the federal government and its involvement in the daily lives of citizens, there is no threat of outright tyranny given the maturity of the federal bureaucracy.

Any over-reach of federal power in the modern world is not one that can or should be addressed through armed revolt, but rather will be resolved through the political process. Words, not guns, are the best weapons against federal power in the 21^st Century.

After all, are a few nutjobs with AK-47’s really going to overthrown the federal government, the same federal government with an arsenal of over 1000 nuclear warheads?

While the crazies with bazookas are no longer able to overthrow the government by “bearing arms”, they are able to kill innocent people every day. From Columbine to Jonesboro, from Sandy Hook to Aurora, mass shootings are taking place way too often right now and are being facilitated by a legal system that has decided it has no power to stand in the way of violence against the innocent.

This is not to mention the hundreds of people killed every year in our nation’s inner cities as a result of gang violence, often by virtue of the offenders gaining access to weapons that serve no purpose in an urban setting other than to facilitate the killing of other human beings.

In 2009, the US death rate by firearms was 10.2 per 100,000 people. No other developed country saw a rate even half that high and in Canada, where there a similar cultural fondness for hunting but no similar belief in the fundamental right of civilian armament, firearms only killed 2.5 per 100,000 people, less than ¼ the US total.

Numbers don’t lie: the United States has a gun problem. Despite having just 4.5 percent of the world’s population, the United States is home to 40% of the world’s civilian firearms, many of which are being used in the commission of violence against other human beings.

Well before the Constitution was ratified, our nation was founded upon the principles established in the Declaration of Independence. In that founding piece of American political philosophy, the “founding fathers” declared an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

At the risk of boring you on the specifics of constitutional history, I will just mention the fact that the Declaration of Independence came first, then the war, then the Articles of Confederation, and finally the Constitution, with its 10-amendment “Bill of Rights” attached as a compromise in order to pass a resolution that replaced the faulty Articles of Confederation with a solid government.

Surely the Constitution, designed simply to set up a government with the power to unify the various states into a true and lasting Union, was not intended to come in conflict with the principles established at the birth of the nation.

But as it is applied today, the 2^nd Amendment does just that. In the course of trying to protect the supposed right to civilian armament, the government has failed its duty to ensure the people are able to exercise their inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Last year, over 11,000 people were stripped of that right thanks to the nation’s unwillingness to cure its growing addiction to and problem with guns.

With each shooting and with each life lost thanks to the 2^nd Amendment, I become more and more embarrassed to be associated with American. The “right to bear arms”, if it does exist in the Constitution, has run its course and while we somehow remain blind to that fact, everyone else in the world see it for what it is: A blemish on the great legacy of democracy in America.  

That blemish, more than any other political, economic, or moral misgiving of our country, is a true blot on the great record of the United States of America. As long as that blot remains, I for one cannot get myself to say that I am “Proud to Be an American”.