Nowadays, we can name but a single place, and instantly everyone knows what itap about: Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Newtown. San Bernardino. Orlando. And now, mournfully, we add Dallas. When we hear the names of these sites of slaughter, we are reminded of our national shock. And our national shame.
In the aftermath of Orlando, I heard an interview on NPR with Anne Marie Hochhalter, a victim of the carnage at Columbine. She is paralyzed for life. What she insightfully observed is, while the circumstance of each massacre was different, they have one thing in common: “A crazy guy with a gun.” Crazy, or angry, or both.
Yet in the 17 years since Columbine, after so many bloodbaths, what has been done to mitigate them? Almost nothing.
Moreover, in all that time, short of banning human birth, no one has figured out how to keep “a crazy guy” off the streets. But plenty of people — politicians, police, pundits, just plain citizens — have figured out how to shrink the number of guns on the market, the number of guns available to “a crazy man”: make them harder to get. However, they face obstacles that continue to cost innocent lives.
Like the argument from the gun-rights crowd that advocates more weapons out there in our world. Consider Donald Trump’s assertion after Orlando that it would have been great if someone in the nightclub had shot the killer “right smack between the eyes.” Yes it would, absolutely.
But here’s the fatal flaw. A couple of weeks ago on a TV newscast I saw police-cam video of an officer ordering a guy out of his car. Instead of obeying, the guy began to drive off. So this trained policeman fired seven shots. He hit the guy exactly once. Yet the NRA and Trump and others think untrained civilians, already probably panicked, ought to be firing toward a madman in a crowded nightclub … or movie theater … or school? There is more than one kind of madman among us.
Those who still believe in common-sense control over the pell-mell sale of guns shouldn’t give up. Millions of Americans don’t want to. If polls are accurate, most Americans don’t want to.
Yet barriers still are built by people who don’t justify their opposition, beyond their blind belief that the Second Amendment is impervious.
So go back to the Constitution, the very Constitution we all treasure, and reread the Second Amendment, always at issue when calls for gun control crop up. Its precise wording, including punctuation, is, “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.”
The Founding Fathers had to mean one of two things by that key word, “regulated.” Either that the militia bearing arms would be regulated by someone or something, or that the bearing of arms themselves would be regulated.
Yet today, opponents of any gun control keep up their calamitous campaign. Do they seriously believe they are the very militia the founders had in mind?
So letap change one term in the debate: don’t use “gun control” anymore; use “gun regulation.” Then we’re abiding by the Constitution, just as the Founding Fathers wanted.
House Speaker Paul Ryan last week deceptively declared, “We can have security and keep to the Constitution at the same time.” But a fellow Republican, Sen. Lindsay Graham, responded more reasonably, “The Constitution’s a sacred document, but it is not a suicide pact.”
These are legitimate issues. With life-and-death import. They deserve a reasonable debate. It cannot be left to wither. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would let it, saying last week, “Clearly, we have got to move on.” Wrong. If we “move on,” debate will not be the only thing that dies.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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