What Happens In Vegas...

I've been on record in these pages as saying the Second Amendment covers your right to not only own guns, but aircraft carriers, nuclear missiles, tanks, Predator drones, etc. It has to in order to fulfill that defense against tyranny part gun nuts love to cite while defending their AR15s with bump-fire stocks that have no legitimate self defense or hunting purpose.

I still think this is true, this country was founded on a violent insurgency, and through a lucky turn of events, it established a regime that was a vast improvement over the one overthrown. That is, historically, anomalous. The French Revolution? Russian Revolution? The Khmer Rouge, Mao, the Islamists who took over Iran in 1979? Pretty much every time people have risen in violence to overthrow a tyrant they've installed a tyrant as bad or worse. So for all the founding fathers got right, they fucked up some too.

Slavery? Women's suffrage? There was lots of stuff the founders encoded into their fledgling republic that was fucked up and while I'm not anti-gun (I enjoy shooting, and I see valid uses), unfettered and unvetted gun ownership and carriage is one of the most problematic legacies that have yet to be addressed. Women vote, we've sort of liberated the slaves, but it's basically illegal to ask someone why they want a 30th semi-auto long gun with a bump-fire stock and another 3,000 rounds of ammo.

The Second Amendment is just an amendment. And there's nothing 'well regulated' about the so-called militia that has all these high capacity magazines, machine gun workarounds and such. It can and should be changed because over 500 people were injured or killed in direct violation of their 'liberty' to listen to terrible music in Las Vegas and go home unharmed by anything other than a country concert.

You gun nuts, God bless you, if you do't want Australian or Japanese style gun control to eventually come to pass, quit pretending like the right to own weapons of indiscriminate mass murder is more important than the right to survive a concert. I don't believe gun control measures by themselves will solve the problem, I think big pharma is as culpable in this as the gun lobby (homicidal/suicidal ideation related to SSRI's is vanishingly rare as a percentage, but it doesn't take much of a fraction of 30 million people to cause big problems). But hearing an ATF official explain that bump-fire stocks are legal because they follow the letter of the law if not the spirit, I have a problem with that. These are tools designed to make the gun an indiscriminate killing device.

I have to show my driver's license to buy cold medicine. Last time I was in Walmart, the Krylon was locked up to prevent huffers from stealing spray paint. Maybe, just maybe, it should be harder to murder and maim a crowd of people than it is to get nasal decongestants or a can of Krylon gold.