Louisville, Kentucky.
Nashville, Tennessee.
Where will the next shooting occur? And when?
It’s tough to guess where, but as for when, the best guess is very soon. Today, tomorrow or the next day. It won’t be long. The fact is that shooting are happening more and more frequently, and days where someone is killing other Americans are happening more often than days where they aren’t.
Until 2008, the Supreme Court never interpreted gun ownership as an unfettered individual right. The original reading of it always involved the “well-regulated militia” portion, and even though it might be incomprehensible to modern audiences, the initial intent of the well-regulated militia was so that the new United States would not have to have a standing army.
In fact, as recently as the 1930s, before the country mobilized for World War II, our army was smaller than that of most European countries. It wasn’t until the postwar era, when the Cold War began, that we started maintaining a large peacetime army.
Militias were a relic from another century.
In the late 1940s, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson wrote on why gun ownership couldn’t be completely unregulated.
“The choice is not between order and liberty,” Jackson wrote. “It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
No one claims freedom of the press is absolute, or freedom or speech, or freedom of religion.
So why should gun ownership be absolute?
Even in 2008, when Antonin Scalia separated gun ownership from the militia clause and declared it an individual right, he never claimed there was a right for individuals to own any type of weapon they wanted.
Thaty has come since then from the government-hating extremists. The Founders never intended people to be armed to resist the government they were creating. That would be stupid, and they were anything but stupid.
It’s time to stop making it easy for people to become murderers.