You can support Second Amendment and want gun reform, too

Dear gun nuts. What? What do you mean? I can’t say that. Why not? Because it hurts your feelings? Might you remember what Ben Shapiro, the high priest of conservativism, said about facts, right? About how they don’t care about people’s feelings. What happened to that right-wing sermon? I always liked it. Sorry, I digress. 

After a tragedy like the one at the Covenant School in Nashville, where three children and three adults were shot and killed by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who identified as a man, used he/him pronouns and preferred to be called Aidan, Americans get a reminder of just how unhinged the firearm fanatics really are. Just let them talk and try not to cringe. There really are people out there who care more about protecting the right to own a gun than our responsibility to keep our children safe. 

They stopped making sense years ago. The same people who think we should scale back the First Amendment when they’re offended by an idea, who wiped their feet on the Fourth Amendment in the name of being tough on crime, and who don’t let the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment preclude the death penalty, those same people think the Second Amendment is sacred and absolute. They think that the right to bear arms somehow extends to being able to buy any gun in any quantity, at any time without any restrictions. 

They’re okay with age limits if we’re talking about how a person needs to be 21, to walk into a casino, or buy a drink at a bar. But they think that person should be able to buy a rifle at 18. And they don’t seem troubled by the fact that since 1791, the year that the Second Amendment was ratified, we have moved swiftly from the musket to the winchester to now the AR-15 assault rifle. As a son of a retired cop who grew up with several guns in the house, literally a rifle sitting above the fireplace, someone raised in farm country full of pickup trucks with gun racks, I don’t hate guns. And I’m not afraid of guns. But nor do I love guns or worship them.

I am however, quite fond of common sense. What it tells me is that you can support the Second Amendment and consider sacred the rights to use a firearm to defend yourself, your family or your home and still think we should be able to impose limits on what kind of guns get manufactured, bought and owned. One doesn’t interfere with the other. 

I’ve been on the job as a journalist for more than 30 years, and I have seen plenty of cases of activists who don’t give an inch or compromise. Everything in their politics is all or nothing. There is no in-between. The pro-abortion lobby thinks that if you impose waiting periods or parental notification laws, or even outlaw the barbaric practice of late-term abortions, well then you’re not really pro-choice. The race hustlers believe that if you don’t go along with every single hare-brained and divisive scheme they come up with in the name of racial justice, well then, well you must be a racist. That kind of talk gets us nowhere. 

Add to that the interference from the National Rifle Association. The NRA’s generous political contributions to the GOP over the years have bought the Republican Party. The organization has the receipts. I know this story. In my line of work, I battle almost weekly with powerful special interests with money to spend. They corrode and corrupt everything they touch, from the public schools to the pharmaceutical industry to the legal system and the political arena. The blue team plays this game, and so does the red team. Because in politics, the only color that really matters is green. The result? More guns, more death, more heartache, rinse and repeat.