Yard signs urging a recall are popping up in my neighborhood. The gun lobby has taken aim at state Sen. Evie Hudak. The Democrat voted for a trio of new laws governing guns in Colorado after several mass shootings the year before, one of them at a Colorado movie theater.
Two other senators, both Democrats from Front Range cities, have already been recalled in Colorado. Replacing Hudak would tilt the Colorado statehouse with Republicans toeing the gun lobby’s line. The final triumph would be a Republican governor willing to reverse the new gun laws. Rural Colorado has sprouted several Republicans who promise to do just that if elected next year to replace Gov. John Hickenlooper.
Gun rights resonate in rural areas even more strongly than in the cities. One Republican gubernatorial aspirant has even argued that guns are essential to rural living.
I grew up in a town of 7,300 people. I mowed lawns, not alfalfa. My dad kept two guns, a single-action shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle. They rarely left the closet, even for target shooting.
The real action came on Sunday nights. After dinner at my grandparents’ house on the farm, “us men folk” would enter the barn. There, we protected home and hearth from European invaders, picking off English sparrows lurking in the rafters with our BB guns before they could further pilfer Grandpa’s grain. How we accomplished this without benefit of 30-round magazines, I’m still not sure. Rattlesnakes were dispatched with shovels.
Clearly, the U.S. Constitution proclaims that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” More problematic is the first half of the sentence: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state … .”
You hear “right to bear arms” all the time. “Well regulated,” not so much. Our final arbiter in these matters, the U.S. Supreme Court, has been deeply divided about just what the founders were thinking when they inserted this problematic clause.
We have limits on where we can bear arms. In most places, you can’t take a machine gun into your local city council meeting. You can’t brandish a bazooka when attending a football game, just in case a fan of the other team might open fire.
The new laws in Colorado would seem to be small limits. One limits ammunition magazines to 15 bullets. That would seem plenty sufficient for self-defense, unless you’re in a Hollywood movie.
Another requires that anybody buying a gun, even from a friend, undergo a background check. Gun defenders dismiss this as ineffective. They say criminals won’t get background checks. Well, it turns out that some do. In 2012, when only people buying from businesses were required to undergo background checks, some 2,000 were barred from getting guns because they had criminal backgrounds, restraining orders against them, or for some other, similar reason.
Will any of this preclude the possibility of a crazed individual from spewing shots into a crowded theater? No. Will I someday find myself in a situation where I want a gun in my pocket, for self-defense? Maybe. But I’m not persuaded that the answer to somebody with a gun opening fire in a crowded theater is for everybody else to have a gun, too. Or a bazooka.
My yard sign will say this:
I support the Second Amendment.
I support a well-regulated militia.
I support Evie Hudak.
Allen Best publishes an online newsmagazine at mountaintown .
