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Since our legislature will convene in special session next week to address the problems caused by kids with guns, we need to take another look at the Second Amendment:
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep
and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
That is, the militia must be regulated if citizens are to be free, and the way to keep the militia in line is to insure that common people have a guaranteed right to arm themselves against the militia -- the government.
Since the authors of the Second Amendment had just fomented a violent revolution, this must be the original intent. It also means that we should be as well armed as the militia we need to regulate, or else the original intent is subverted. If there are going to be machine guns, tanks, missiles, grenades, etc., then these weapons belong in private hands, too.
That's a frightening thought -- the feds and some local police already produce enough senseless carnage with such hardware -- but there's no other honest reading of the Second Amendment. Robin Heid, who ran for governor in 1990, can show you court rulings which support this reading.
However, there is a way to preserve the constitution while reducing the dangers from guns on the street.
We just take the original intent
concept and
apply it to weaponry. Nobody -- citizens, criminals,
police, militia -- will be allowed to possess or use a gun
of a type which was not in use in 1791.
No more AK-47 assault rifles that can spray dozens of rounds per second; instead, there's the Kentucky long rifle -- if it was good enough for Daniel Boone to conquer the wilderness, it should be good enough for us.
No more fast 9-mm pistols, either -- the state of the handgun art in Colorado will be a .60-caliber smoothbore single-shot flintlock with a waterproof pan.
Enforcement shouldn't be that difficult. Any non-conforming gun would be confiscated on the spot and dispatched to a blast furnace. Mainly, though, ammunition sales would be limited to black powder, lead and flint, which would be sold to all comers.
The results? Law-abiding NRA members could still hunt and target-shoot to their hearts' content.
Criminals and cops would still shoot, but they'd be careful -- you don't spray bullets promiscuously when it takes at least a minute to reload and the barrel must be cleaned often lest it corrode -- so few bystanders would be injured.
Along this line, the culture of gun use would improve because you couldn't just pick up a gun and start firing. You'd have to pour your own bullets while mastering the intricacies of patches, flint strikers, ramrods, pans, powder loads, etc. Consequently, all gun users would be more than thoughtful about weapons and their use.
Granted, original-intent guns wouldn't make all the problems go away. But we wouldn't have people spraying lead promiscuously, and we'd honor the constitution. The legislature could do worse, and it probably will.
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