The Wild Wild West

Fear. Security. Both of these two concepts imbibe the tenets of both sides of the argument on arms in the United States. Fear by those worried the government will tyrannize them if they are not armed, and fear of being tyrannized by the man walking down the street who may or may not be armed. Security knowing you have the ability to protect yourself if needed, and security knowing your neighbor doesn’t have a gun that could harm you by accident or choice.

Of course you should have the right to protect yourself, and of course you should have the right to feel safe as you move through your daily life. Not many would argue against those two high-level rights. It gets dirty and gray when you start having to write actual enforceable legislation to secure these rights. It’s easy to look back at our nation’s history and see the progression of the right to bear arms. Our founding fathers saw what happened when their former leadership attempted to disarm them to keep them from uprising—it is obvious this is where the second amendment stemmed from. As we moved westward into new and uncharted territories, one would be considered foolish not to have arms to protect oneself from the unknown dangers in those unexplored lands. A gun was a natural part of the daily outfit for these pioneers.

Today is very different. We now live in a world where the newspapers don’t tell us of the battle of Lexington or the Alamo, but rather of domestic battles between disturbed youth who kill 12 fellow citizens in a movie theater. There are no longer happy stories about the victory at Yorktown or San Jacinto, but rather tragic stories of police shooting dead an armed civilian at the Empire State Building to prevent him from reeking further havoc on his fellow New Yorkers. What has changed between then and now? Why is there such great confusion now about who are our friends and who are our enemies? Are these senseless killings just a symptom of a deeper problem, and if so what is that problem? It’s possible guns are the problem, but it doesn’t seem like they were the problem 150 years ago. The core problem is either an overall lowered degree of respect for our fellow human beings, or a generally higher population of nutters in America. In either case guns aren’t helping the situation, nor can they be blamed as the sole problem. It’s true that the world would be a more peaceful and wonderful place if no one had guns, but guns aren’t ever going away. They exist today, and there is no way to undo them, even if we were able to legislate them into oblivion. What we can do is figure out how to live with them, figure out how to more intelligently regulate their distribution, and figure out how to help those so distressed they feel like massacring innocent bystanders is their only recourse to their troubled life. These are tough problems to solve, but we’ve overcome much more difficult trials as a nation. There is no reason we can’t overcome this too if we work together with the common goal of less fear and more security.

Thoughts by Ryan Dorshorst

America was founded before weapons of mass destruction and the AK-47

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