Twenty-five years ago, a little after sunrise on a Monday morning, the front door of my house was kicked in by a man who had blown his mind with crack cocaine. He marched my family upstairs at gunpoint. When I reached the top of the stairs and turned around, he put the gun in my forehead and pulled the trigger.
I’ve always heard it was good to begin a composition with an arresting opening paragraph. That’s the catchiest one I can offer from an otherwise modest biography. I hope the rest of this essay lives up to the opening. I’ll do my best.
I don’t mind admitting this incident gave me a lifelong aversion to guns. I don’t have any objection to other law-abiding citizens bearing arms – in fact, I’m strongly in favor of it. It’s just not a right I have chosen to exercise, although I’m working on getting over it. I’m fascinated by the beauty and science of firearms. I rarely pass a gun magazine on the stands without flipping it open, and I love attending gun shows. My first close encounter with a gun was rather… intense, so I’m understandably nervous around them. I recently discovered I’m a remarkably good shot with a target rifle, after some friends invited me to shoot with them. I’ve decided twenty-five years is long enough to be uncomfortable around the reality of something I’ve always supported in theory.
The Second Amendment is once again in the news, as the Supreme Court considers a case that would invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to apply it to the states, striking down restrictive state and local gun-control laws… oh, wait. You’re probably wondering why I’m still here, having been shot in the head and all. Well, I got lucky. I was able to knock the gun out of the way just in time, and the bullet wound up in the wall, instead of my brain. I had managed to make a hasty call to the police as the door was being kicked in, and they arrived to find the perp and I wrestling for control of the weapon at the bottom of the stairs. No one died in my house that day.
I wish the Supreme Court would do more than rule the Second Amendment applies to the states. It’s long past time the last, ridiculous cobwebs of ambiguity were cleared away from the right to keep and bear arms. Gun control has been simmering on low heat for a while, after boiling over in the Nineties. We should clear it off the Constitutional stove altogether. We have better things to do than slip into another bitter, tedious argument about whether the government can interfere with our right, and duty, to defend ourselves.
I'm still waiting for one of those gun control nuts to put a sign on their doors declaring it a gun free zone.
Why do you think they're afraid to do so?
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