The American electorate sits at a crossroads. It can either continue to elect those who appease gun manufacturers and enthusiasts, thereby continuing to imperil Americans, or it can make an effective change.
The U.S. can take a page out of its neighbors’ playbook on this issue by removing the fear that has captivated many Americans by changing the process whereby people can acquire firearms because the status quo approach has failed.
Driven by sheer close-mindedness, those who cling to their gun rights with a death grip persistently impose their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in various state legislatures and in Congress in order to oppose rational measures to quell a dangerous epidemic of death by gun, declaring it oppressive of the government to limit their rights.
Therefore it is time for Americans to ask: “Why do we have a government?” Eminent English philosophers of the 17th century John Locke and Thomas Hobbes contribute compelling answers.
According to Locke, it is the job of the government to protect natural, perhaps inalienable, rights of life, liberty, and property. The government performs this job, and the citizens of the civil state relinquish certain abilities in order to have a civil society, relative domestic peace, and protection of property rights in a relationship called the social contract.
The escalation of massacres in the past two decades in the U.S. indicates that the government is not holding up its end of the social contract.
According to Hobbes, entrance into the social contract is necessary to overcome the state of nature, a war of all men against all men. This war could be characterized by the recent mad dash to purchase firearms. This represents a breakdown of civil society because people fear attacks from other citizens, those who use guns offensively. An increasingly armed civilian population contributes to a treacherous climate where people take matters into their own hands to protect themselves. An active government is necessarily justified to protect the Lockean inalienable rights, to combat that state of nature, to avoid the war of all men against all men. Abuse of gun privileges in the U.S. is a scandal, and a re-evaluation of how gun privileges are prescribed is in order.
A modest proposal would be a shift in policy towards a model similar to that employed in Japan. To begin, compulsory mental fitness tests, background checks and gun classes precede any sort of purchase. Another feature: continuous ownership means continuous re-evaluation of mental fitness and classes. The types of firearms that can be purchased legally are limited, and secure home storage is required. Similar to how people need to register car purchases and become licensed and insured, gun owners must be held accountable for their purchases. Unlike automobile regulatory oversight, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is impotent and underfunded.
It is clear that the Second Amendment, or the interpretation of it, is not meeting the perilous challenges of the 21st century because the laws that exist, or their enforcement, are mediocre at best, especially to deal with the types of weaponry that can be held by the American public today.
Perhaps a new amendment must be passed to elucidate the confusing and potentially outdated language of the 18th-century Second Amendment and provide clear restrictions on certain types of firearms and ammunition so that judicial activists are no longer able to interpret the constitution in such a reckless fashion, like in July, 2012 when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that rocket-launchers might be protected under the Second Amendment.
Ultimately, it is up to the electorate to make the necessary changes happen. New legislative measures or a constitutional amendment to abridge certain gun privileges are needed, and it is time to prevail over those who have abdicated responsibility for the safety of the American public.