Newtown and the Constitution

While not unexpected, I am still disappointed in the online postings falling back on the second amendment, the right to bear arms, in light of the tragedy that took place in Newtown.

Could we all stop a minute and think about the constitution and its amendments differently?  Is the Bill of Rights immune from amendment?

First, why did the authors of the constitution provide for amendments?  They recognized that the document, conceived by men, might have flaws.  They almost immediately introduced those first ten amendments, what we call the Bill of Rights.   Some were concerned that the original constitution did not spell these rights out.  But even then, not all of the founding fathers agreed on the need for those first ten amendments.

Now, let's think about amendments generally.  They occur because the constitution was meant to be a living, breathing document and that over time, changes in society may drive the need to revise (i.e., amend) the constitution.  Remember that the "Bill of Rights" is nothing more than a name for the first ten amendments.  And, just like all the rest, are subject to amendment themselves, if the people decide there's a need to amend.  (There is precedent.  The twenty-first amendment overturned the eighteenth amendment which prohibited alcohol.  I'm sure many of us are grateful for that circumstance.)

Finally, let's think about the second amendment specifically.  Think about the age in which the authors lived.  "Arms" meant a muzzle load musket, which could only fire one shot at a time.  The people of the time needed arms to defend themselves in wild frontiers and to provide food for their families and themselves.  How is that the case today?  We have home alarm systems to warn us of intrusion.  We have police, sheriff, and state trooper departments to serve as first responders when we encounter threat.  Most of us get our food in grocery stores.  Some of us hunt for food, but does that call for a semi automatic weapon to kill a deer, a pheasant, or a duck?

Beyond the issue of arms, consider that of mental health.  Remember, in 1789, medicine as a discipline barely existed.  People were still using leeches to cure the ill.  It was before Freud.  Before treatment for paranoid schizophrenia.  It might as well have been in biblical times when those suffering from what we would recognize as mental illness were considered possessed by demons.  And certainly a condition as complex as autism was well beyond the abilities of the best of the practitioners.  We still grope in the twenty-first century for answers to that condition.

Could the framers of the constitution have imagined a world of video games that desensitize the participant to violence, of stores full of toy guns?  

The world has changed since then.  We have a responsibility to acknowledge the extent of that change and to accept the effects such change mandates to the law of the land.

I confess that President Obama's remarks in Newtown, along with some of the online comments I've read, motivated me to develop these thoughts.  

Repeating my earlier plea, could we please stop and think.  Not react, not shoot from the hip, not fall back on established thoughts and positions.  Think.  Please.  It's really important.

The lives of our children depend on it.