Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

The United States Senate once again refused to act and make any amendments to the countries gun laws which might restrict the individual ownership of guns in the United States of America. The latest move led by some senators was to restrict and refuse such ownership from terrorist or mentally unstable people, but the Senate as a whole refused to support the request.

Many observers around the world continue to be staggered at a community that is so entrenched that will not even allow reasoned argument, research or listen to its own experience where so many citizens are killed or injured each year.

The 2nd amendment was framed in a different time and circumstance, when there were genuine threats, external and internal, to the fledgling nation.  The amendment states that it is incumbent on United States citizens to have “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” These forefathers intimated that the nation needed the protection of a well-armed militia. And at that time it was well argued and understood that such a militia was necessary to support and supplement the limited defense forces that were at hand. This is clearly is not the case today as the United States has arguably the most “effective” and second largest defense force in the world (As of 31 December 2013, 1,369,532 people were on active duty in the armed forces, with an additional 850,880 people in the seven reserve components, China has the largest standing army in the world, with around 2.3 million active personnel).

It has been argued that the judicial system and the governments of the United States, local, state and national, have affected and appropriated the original intent of the 2nd amendment to move from a collective intent to the individual right reflected in the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment, with armaments of a magnitude and ferocity that could not have been imagined by the nations forefathers.

It defies belief that at this time in 2016 that rational consideration plays very little in the contemplation of what the forefathers very likely intended in their design. One can ponder to ask whether the forefathers could have imagined that in 2013, firearms were used in 84,258 nonfatal injuries, resulted in 21,175 suicides, 505 deaths due to accidental discharge, or could suggest that they imagined 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870, and 64 school shootings, or could have forced them to contemplate more than 13,286 people murdered in the US by firearms in 2015.

Could these same founding fathers have imagined that so many people died from gunfire that the death toll between 1968 and 2011 in the USA outstrips all deaths in wars ever fought by the United States defense forces. According to research by Politifact, there were about 1.4 million firearm deaths in that period, compared with 1.2 million US deaths in every conflict from the War of Independence to Iraq. Of all the murders in the US in 2012, 60% were by firearm compared with 31% in Canada, 18.2% in Australia, and just 10% in the UK. 

Those same forefathers were unlikely to have imagined allowing terrorist or mentally disturbed people being granted unfettered access to firearms? 

What beggars belief is that a nation can watch a 23-year-old student kill thirty-two students and faculty members at Virginia Tech, and wound another seventeen students and faculty members before committing suicide. Can watch a 20-year-old fatally shoot 20 children aged between 6 and 7 years old, as well as six adult staff members and not be moved, a nation that can seemingly live with these gun laws when at the Umpqua Community College a 26-year-old student killed eight students and one teacher, and injuring nine others, then committing suicide or that 49 young people at a night club in can be killed with another 50 injured or that there is no national reflection on the fact that 1.4 million of their own citizens can be killed by guns.

What totally confounds belief is that such a nation cannot demand that, 'There must be a better way' of its leaders today.

If guns don’t kill people, only people kill people, maybe people then don’t need guns.