CALLING FOR STRONG LEGISLATIVE ACTION AGAINST GUN VIOLENCE
(…is much like spitting to windward)

The Newtown slaughter seems to have been the last straw as far as most of the public is concerned. So it is all fired up to see some action taken to prevent similar events from occurring in the future….and our career politicos are more than happy to oblige…sorta, with the President, the Vice President, and many members of Congress are getting so much heat about it they’re all scrambling to come up with legislative proposals to do so. There’s only one problem…it’s our Second Amendment…which is written in quite explicit and declaratory language, leaving very little wiggle room for legislative maneuvering. So any such efforts to get around it that way are more than likely to be shot down in the courts, resulting with nothing being done about the problem, other than wasting a lot of time and money.

 My puzzlement about all this is why no one seems to even consider the obvious and proper means which the founders of our republic clearly spelled  out for us in the Constitution. That is…if you want to change something…use the Amendment process, stupidos…that’s why we gave it to you!  And while they made the amendment process cumbersome, to prevent populist emotions du jour from stampeding us in the wrong direction, the process can be made to move quite rapidly if folks really want it to, by applying extreme constituent pressures on both State and Federal elected officials. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is a prime example of that, it being approved from start to finish in one year’s time (and later repealed in only 18 months time).

So, if we the people, are so upset and determined to eliminate the insanity of having military high volume, rapid fire, automatic weapons freely available to any nut case who wants one, because of a penchant for mayhem and floods of blood, why not holler and push these politicos of ours to amend…the Second Amendment? If that’s what we want the let it be done that way. That would be the proper constitutional way as provided for by that document. All it would take is to prepare a carefully thought out and crafted language for it, present it to Congress where, with a 2/3 majority approving it, that would send it to the State legislatures for ratification, and if 3/4 of these approved it…it would become the law of the land, avoiding these long drawn out useless pro-con arguments about it.. The people would have spoken…and the rest could shut the hell up.

Meanwhile, we could instead focus on the best ways and means to change our societal mindset about violence in general, and gun violence in particular.  A much more effective way than just trying to continue making end runs around that pesky Second Amendment of ours.

CENTURION