Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Repeal the Second Amendment

Veronica Moser-Sullivan. Murdered. Six-year-old girls need to be protected from gun owners. Time to repeal the Second Amendment. Veronica was murdered in the theater, a place that should be safe, but she lives in the US, a nation more in love with its guns than they love their six-year-old girls. This is flat wrong.
The purpose of the 'right' to own guns was to be sure the government was afraid of insurrection--sure worked well in 1861, didn't it? The insurrectionists defended slavery--proud moment for the Second Amendment. Now, however, we need an insurrection that ends that right. Clearly, gun owners are a huge and powerful lobby. My question to them: When will you all grow a conscience?

Each justification for guns is more ludicrous than the next. Today I heard some ranting gun club official say on National Public Radio that if we restrict guns these assailants will blow up bombs. That is like saying if we outlaw sexual harassment there will be more rapes. Their logic is more full of holes than their targets. I prefer the theatrics of gun control advocates over the pyrotechnics of those who aren't fazed by the totally avoidable murder of Veronica and other children.

Insurrection is far more successful and sustainable using nonviolence. The results of research on methods of seeking maximal change (which is the toughest goal of all) are just as validity threat-proof as is the research that shows global climate change or evolution. Those who choose to discount science certainly are all around us and they are all dead wrong. No guns are needed if we decide, as a people, to overthrow our government, to secede, or to depose someone we regard as a dictator. Massive, strategic civil society campaigns have done the job many times around the world at a higher success rate than violence and with far more sustainable democratic, civil, and human rights as long term outcomes. Get rid of the guns. No longer needed.

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