gun rights

Posted by Katharine on January 13, 2013, 7:25 am
189.254.205.150

I am posting a column on gun rights from the Cheyenne Tribune-Eagle, written by a very close friend of ours. I realize the topic is exhaustively covered at present but I thought his introduction of a Latin American perspective might interest some of you. Gun Rights by Jack Pugh Let me watch my children grow, to see what they become --“Too Old to Die Young”, Moe Bandy We’re about to have a gun fight in Congress. It’s easy to predict the outcome. Guns will win. Over the years I’ve joined two organizations that lobby state legislatures and Congress on issues of interest to their members. One is the American Motorcycle Association (AMA) and the other is the National Rifle Association (NRA). Neither membership lasted very long. Both organizations advocate for the use of machines that expose users to danger. Motorcycles expose riders to their own lack of skill and to inattentive and incompetent drivers. The AMA’s safety programs offer excellent training in defensive awareness for motorcyclists, but the danger is always just behind you as you ride. There is nothing about motorcycles that bears comparison to guns as an element of danger, however. The purpose of a motorcycle is transportation. The purpose of a gun is to kill. The NRA’s gun safety programs are superb and teach users how to handle a weapon and to shoot, but they cannot change the nature of a gun or the impulse to use it in anger or derangement. I left the AMA because of its hypocrisy on safety issues, particularly regarding the use of helmets, and its opposition to the establishment of wilderness areas on public lands in the West. The AMA will tell you that you should wear a helmet when you ride, but it will oppose laws that require it. This is expressed as preservation of an individual right, which is a complete and I think a deliberate misunderstanding of the difference between a right and a privilege. I left the NRA many years ago when I finally understood why it opposes regulating the availability of guns. Our rights are anchored in abstract principles applied to the organization and management of society. Our courts have held our rights to be less than absolute, allowing restrictions and regulation of the behaviors governed by them. Most of these restrictions are centered on how we interact with each other. The men who run the National Rifle Association seem to accept this principle in all areas of rights except the right to own and bear arms. That principle matters more to them than people do. People are the abstraction in this case, and the right to bear arms is the flesh and blood they cling to. That is why Wayne LaPierre of the NRA responded to the mass murder of the children of Newtown, Connecticut with such clumsy and nasty insensitivity. It is why the NRA opposes registering guns but supports registering people with a diagnosis of mental illness. It is why there is no body count high enough for the leadership of the NRA to accept regulation of the Second Amendment principle, an obsession they practice as a religion. We can’t just dump blame for these deaths only on the National Rifle Association. In a country that has more gun shops than it does grocery stores, that has almost as many guns in circulation as it does people, and which has sanctioned the murder of children overseas, we all share some of the responsibility. In the early 1980s El Salvador was in the throes of a civil war. A communist insurgency was challenging the government for control of the country. The Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army was a rapid strike force organized and trained by the U.S. Army Special Forces, and had been fighting insurgents near the mountain village of El Mozote. After the engagement the battalion commanders ordered El Mozote and neighboring villages locked down, despite their neutrality in the struggle. Over the course of the next three days the soldiers systematically raped women and young girls and executed between 800-900 people. Many of those murdered were children. I read the list of the dead. I found fifty-five children aged twelve and under among the victims in the first third of the list, and quit counting. The total is much higher. The youngest was two months old. The Reagan administration, eager to convince Congress to continue funding the Salvadoran army, at first flatly denied that this massacre occurred, then tried to justify the murders as combat related. Training a foreign military force is not the same as sanctioning its actions. But when you cover up and justify illegal actions you assume responsibility for them along with the perpetrators. The slaughtered children of El Mozote, victims of rape and savage murder, became our responsibility the moment the Reagan Administration lied to Congress about the massacre. Those children in El Salvador were sacrificed for political and philosophical principles. And so were the massacred children of Newtown, Connecticut, and so were the dead and maimed in the other mass shootings in this country in recent years. They are the collateral damage, the acceptable and inevitable body count, of our acceptance of the NRA’s perverted view of our Second Amendment rights. We have made the NRA’s perversion our perversion. God help us if we won’t change that. About the Children of El Salvador: “The Truth of El Mozote”, Mark Danner, The New Yorker, Dec. 6, 1993

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