Pug-butter
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- Jan 25, 2012
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This is a piece I wrote for English class, the last major grade of the year. It's not handed in yet and you guys are about the closest I have to a direct source. So I'd like some advice. Please tell me what you think, especially improvements to be made.
This is free domain if anyone wants to use it for anything.
This is free domain if anyone wants to use it for anything.
From Fantasy’s shadow-clad necromancers to the monstrosities lurking in the corners of Horror, stories without conflict are banal. Every story needs a hero and every hero his foil or his nemesis. The tale to be discussed here is one of strength and weakness, civility and betrayal: imagine, if you will, that there is a country in which every man, woman and child walking the streets is capable of murder. They carry deadly implements openly, often without reprimand, and at any time in the day a man could be spilt forth upon the ground by his neighbor at the mere mention of any dishonor. Yet he does not, for this tale is that of Eighteenth Century North America, at the time of the American Revolution. Frontier borders rest in such proximity to the towns that they seem almost to call out to the adventurous spirit. The towns themselves are simple, if not outright unsophisticated (the groundbreaking minds contained therein excepted). This was a time and place where a gun was at home upon the shoulder of a minuteman, who was even less of a man without a knife at his hip. Regarding Great Britain’s war with the colonies these arms have not been questioned. Why, though, and at what precise period of time, did their popularity begin its slow descent, to the point where any person wielding so much as a small lockless pocketknife can be branded and even outcast from mainstream America? To find out one must approach the tradition of bearing arms, from hunting to home defense to war, with an open, critical mind free of emotion and propaganda, left-wing or right, liberal or conservative. After all, although a debatably “naïve” young society armed to its metaphorical teeth has survived well into the 21st Century, social standards for tools and, indeed, weapons, have surely changed not without cause. The point stands, however, that a society is objectively safer when armed, despite mass-media claims to the contrary, and this case will be established and protected by way of analyzing the past and present, the support and the opposition, the anecdote and the statistic, alike. The average American has come to fear the same objects without which his country could never have been founded, and does not object as his country slowly rips his rights out from his hand as if a poacher caging a wild beast that can or will not fight; and much in the way that that American’s predecessors defended their property and their freedoms with weapons, he should have just as much right to do so in his own time, notwithstanding the stigmas attached to said weapons.
The United States Bill of Rights and, more specifically, the Second Amendment, were effected in 1791, only fifteen years after the country was founded. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” it declares, “[and] the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It seems so simple a concept: does the country with the weakest army not have the least political influence in its world? Unfortunately, although the Amendment was not legally questioned until 2008 (District of Columbia v. Heller) the words are painfully ambiguous. Who are defined as “the people”? The “well regulated Militia”? Even the “right to bear arms,” one of the few political phrases so susceptible to to social osmosis that every decent American is expected to have heard it, says little of this uninfringeable right—and, furthermore, how shrouded in obscurity that “little” is regardless! District of Columbia v. Heller was set to change that. Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer and co-writer of a book criticizing twelve Supreme Court cases and the restricting effects they had on personal rights in America, began pursuing worthy attorneys to support his cause, despite having never owned a gun himself. The Court ultimately defined these terms in their historical context and affirmed their sustained relevance to modern life. Many of the Justices in the five-four majority clarified their views; Antonin Scalia claimed the right of the people as one of pure individuality, though separate from the definition of the Militia, which comprises any able-bodied, law-abiding citizen and would thus indicate our forefathers’ desire, shared by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other modern activists, to prohibit felons’ possession of weapons. Given the Eighteenth Century’s political context for the law it makes good sense. The first generation of colonists, and all those immigrants arriving in close subsequent years, had migrated to escape oppressive government teetering on the brink of totalitarianism granted that it had not reached that stage already. And as opposed to the dictatorship whence they fled the concept behind
their—our—country was and should still be today that the centralized federal government holds limited power over the people. James Madison and George Mason, who according to Earl Kruschke PhD initially opposed the idea of altering the Constitution; following the Revolutionary War and amidst the former’s presidency, however, they earned the title of the Bill of Rights’ fathers, and argued that the Second Amendment, specifically its promise to let citizens arm themselves, would keep the young government “honest” (Kruschke 118). What government, after all, would be foolish enough to do battle with forces that outnumber it, wield arms, and are angered enough by its tyranny (the outcry against which having been ignored) to use these factors in their favor? But despite this logic the debate rages on.
The observation that the United States are too peppered with violent crime, much of which being performed with the aid of firearms, is probably one of the rare facts over which skeptics and supporters alike agree. Beyond it many fates await the claims, from the stalwart theory to the mere hypothesis to the simply pitiful plead to emotion. Although they may of course deny it, those who endorse strict weapon control can often use the latter more frequently than the former—much more so, at least, I dare say, than gun rights activists, who fight an uphill battle regarding murders and homicides and weapon-related accidents behind which the oft-unquestioned ability to demonize even the most civil gun owner lies. Among such blanket-claims is the declaration that crime will be reduced when the lethal implements enabling its prosperity are banned. Simple statistics disprove this. Charles Montaldo, a private detective, investigated North American gun laws in 2006, by state, with interesting results. Three states in particular form an interesting case. North Dakota, a state in such proximity to Canada that one cannot help but associate it with huge game animals and log cabins, much in the manner of its own expansive wilderness and government-protected parks, has very lenient gun laws, requires no permits of its citizens for them to own weapons. Weapons are registered, but the only permit available to carriers is for Concealed Carry Weaponry (CCW). And America’s crime statistics in this area, as reported by Simon Rogers of The Guardian (of British newspaper renown), is among those with the lowest points in the entire country as of 2011, with fewer than ten gun-related assaults occurring (per 100,000 pop.) that year in North Dakota and fewer than thirty in both Dakotas combined. This obviously does not make any truly impregnable case against the silliness presented in court cases and on picket signs by gun control activists; it does however lead to an interesting anomaly observed in the States’ southeast, which blows huge holes through the logic of the arguments set forth with the purpose of relating crime to the availability of deadly weapons. Montaldo and Rogers report further, most specifically Tennessee and South Carolina, the two states with the most congested cases of gun assaults with between one hundred and 150 cases—again per 100,000 population and in 2011—each. These states, like the Dakotas, have so few laws concerning weapons as to let nearly anyone purchase one, excepting drunkards and minors, although the latter can use weapons bought by their guardians. Tennessee and South Carolina require permits to carry handguns (that is, firearms of the small, potentially one-handed, concealable variety) and little more, much like the Dakotas. And I implore you to wonder: if the laws of each area so resemble those of the other, their environments mirroring each other, why is one mostly at peace while the other is a cesspool by compare, giving you at least ten times the odds of being illegally shot at while you walk the streets? Banning all guns would certainly seem to be an idealistic solution for this—why try to lower assault rates when they could be lost altogether?—but how truly idealistic it is when, with the black market for guns in full swing, such bans would affect only the weapons held by upstanding citizens! And how easy even the past criminal finds himself acquiring these weapons, too, even within legal bounds. Indeed, as reported by New York Times author Michael Lou, criminals waive their rights to purchase and carry firearms upon committing a violent crime regardless of involvement of weapons or the lack thereof. However, the tests criminals take to have these rights reinstated are so lenient and loose as to let nearly any criminal reacquire them, granted that they live in areas where carry and possession are legal at all. And, as is commonly pointed out in activism—gay rights, Black rights, women’s rights—how does one look at two men and differentiate the criminal, be he one of past or future, from the good man?
In the world of hypotheticals, you are now a robber. You patrol the nighttime streets, watching cars and pedestrians, waiting for that perfect time to strike with as few risks and as many rewards as you can manage. You’re a patient robber, after all. But there is a catch: observing the small, frail frame you believe will be our first prey for the night you notice what seems to be a holster at his belt. Do you choose him, perhaps the smallest and weakest of all the passersby, as your target? Surely no man with even a vague sense of intelligence would choose such a fate for himself. And if the weapon itself could instill this second thought, what then does proper training and etiquette with these weapons bring? Aaron Jossie, a writer for the “Truth About Guns” blog, writes about his childhood in a gun-owning household:
Such [otherwise] healthy traits … as curiosity and impulsiveness can be deadly when mixed with just about anything. Singling out guns is not helping to remove the dangers of chainsaws that many people own and leave unlocked in a garage or shed … Removing guns from the home and sheltering kids from firearms altogether only makes kids more susceptible to learn about guns from possibly the worst sources available; T.V. and video games.
In other words if a child is not allowed to learn about guns responsibly and safely from an early age he is not guaranteed freedom from their influence; he may crawl upon the gun in daddy’s closet, or find one in a trash bin, or even obtain a firearm from one of those lenient States when he is a bit older. And if this is the case he will know about guns only from their violent portrayal in movies, video games in television. His ability to see the gun as anything other than a toy or even something that is “badass” is severely impaired, as opposed to the widespread maturity shown around guns at the hands of, for example, families who hunt. I have been involved in outdoors sports since I was seven years old, and I do not remember a time when I did not have a knife in my pocket during any of those trips, even if it was a dinky little Swiss Army folder. Fast-forward to the winter of 2012 and I wore a sheath knife to work. I used it to slice apples and sandwiches, and cut fencing, and I once severed my shoelace when it got caught in machinery, threatening to crush my leg. Yet whenever I took my knife from its sheath, or someone even so much as looked at the silhouette on my belt, it was never more than a deadly piece of sharpened metal I could potentially use to slit a customer’s throat at any time. Never did the knife’s prehistoric history, as man’s first companion in a world of sabertooths and mammoths and other such beasts, armed with tusks and fangs and claws and talons, vastly outmatched him. The knife, and its successors the spear, the sword, the axe, the gun, all are as relevant to man’s history as they are useful even in everyday life.
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That was a different principal, but I still try to wrap my head around how that would have been humanly possible, as if I'd masterminded some brilliant scheme to crush a kid's fingers in the window and make it seem like an accident. I do admit I was a bit pugnacious when they called me in though.