One shot is all it takes. One misfire. Next thing you know, a life is finished.
A 20-year-old woman was killed on Feb. 14 at a party in Redmond when the host was showing off his gun. He thought he had unloaded it and proceeded to shoot through a wall, hitting the woman on the other side in the neck, according to KOMO-4 News.
An eight-year-old girl was shot at her elementary school Feb. 20 in Bremerton when a classmate brought a gun to school. It remains unknown where the gun came from, but The Associated Press reports the parents of the child who had the gun have criminal records.
No Constitutional right is worth the number of lives lost on a daily basis to gunfire. To see the Second Amendment repealed would be one of the happiest days of my life.
The right to bear firearms was a necessity when the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution. Early Americans lived in forests and open countryside where they were subject to attack by wild animals or Native Americans who did not enjoy having their land taken from them. Furthermore, you never knew when some colonial power might come swooping in and you would have to defend the country again.
The wilds of nature have since been replaced with modern cities and no country has the power to invade us anymore. Now guns are only necessary to defend ourselves against each other. It would be a lot simpler to do so if guns were not available for the ordinary citizen.
Our current restrictions are not enough. An investigative undercover report from NBC News’ Jeff Rossen found the Internet is a perfect place to buy any weapon imaginable, no questions asked.
“Hundreds of thousands of guns are for sale, on hundreds of websites,” Rossen said. “We bought everything from a police-grade pistol to a semiautomatic assault rifle. We did it over and over again, even hinting that our buyer is criminal.”
Meeting at various parking lots across the country, Rossen and his team managed to purchase everything from a Glock-23 to an AK-47 to a .50 caliber sniper rifle with armor piercing bullets. All by simply scrounging the Internet for deals and paying with cash at the meet-up.
More proof lies in our abnormally high murder count compared to other industrialized nations. The U.S. consistently ranks highest among modernized countries for its murder rate.
For example, The Guardian reported last year the United Kingdom averages about 600 murders per year. In 2010, there were 12,996 murders in the U.S. — 8,775 of those involved firearms. Consequently, the U.K. has much stricter gun laws. Even the standard British police officer does not carry firearms.
The Founding Fathers could not have envisioned the destructive power of modern guns, nor the ease the Internet would allow in purchasing said weapons. The Second Amendment is outdated.
We have changed and re-interpreted the Constitution before. Black slaves used to be only equivalent to three-fifths of a “real” person, according to the Constitution. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments overturned that after the Civil War. Prohibition was instituted and repealed through Constitutional amendments. The meaning of the First Amendment and what it protects has been constantly refined through the years. Repealing the Second Amendment is not impossible.
The NRA and other gun advocates continue to defend themselves using the old saying, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” They fail to realize the logical conclusion of that premise, that therefore we should keep guns away from people to make it a little bit harder for us to kill each other.