The Arizona Shootings: Getting to the Missing Point --- "It's Guns, Stupid" (Matlin)

Lawyer John Matlin, who comments on US politics and society for EA, writes:

When I write for EA are balanced, I try to do so with balanace and an element of humour. But I am so flabbergasted by the events of the past week that, as a result of the diabolical actions of the gunman who killed six and wounded 14 people in a Tucson, Arizona parking lot, I am impelled to write something that will not only be considered a rant by my detractors but which will no doubt offend many readers who claim: "If you don’t understand the right to bear weapons, you just don’t understand America.”

The repercussions and the debate around this episode will continue for years. But you can be certain that a question  poseed elsewhere --- “Where did the alleged attacker Jared Lee Loughner get the gun?” --- will not be a priority in America. From The New York Times to The Washington Post to CNN and MNSBC, this query was not being posed, let alone answered. No one wants to touch the subject of gun ownership. It has become the third rail of politics. 

The problem lies in four places: the Constitution, the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Gun Lobby with interest groups such as the National Rifle Association. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution begins,  “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” but somehow these words are distorted when discussing the right of Americans to keep and bear arms. Any commo-sense reading of the Amendment would limit the right to bear and keep arms to the armed forces and the police,but only last year, the Supreme Court again upheld the almost unfettered right for American citizens to keep concealed weapons on their persons. 

In years and years of Criminal Justice bills, Congress has banned guns, rifles, and ammunition based on the size of the butt or the shape of the grip. But it has refused to engage in the main debate, namely why have guns at all. I can walk into a local superstore and buy whatever bullets I want.

How is this justifiable in a peaceful society? Why can the Congress not pass restrictive laws, which would still enable Americans to keep guns in a gun or rifle club but ban all automatic and semi-automatic weapons? The answer is simple. By seeking to restrict gun ownership and use, a legislator is signing his/her political death warrant. The gun lobby has bought Congress.  

I have heard the blunt arguments from the right to defend one's person to the need of Grandma to shoot an attacker to “Guns don’t kill, people do.” Such arguments are not worth a bucket of spit when one compares the death statistics in the US to those in other countries that somehow get by without a pistol under the pillow.

The US is the only Western democracy whose citizens have the almost unlimited right to keep guns about their persons. The majority of American states have the death penalty on their statute books. Will the nation ever wake up and accept that violence begets violence?

There has been much chatter this week about "violent rhetoric". But it is not rhetoric that kills. Get your heads out of the sand, America, and get beyond the cross-hairs on Sarah Palin's website to the cross-hairs that matter. If you don’t, be prepared to watch more prominent figures --- not to mention thousands of others --- mowed down in the name of freedom to bear arms.