Posted on 03/08/2005 8:05:19 PM PST by freeholland
The newly appointed CIA Director Porter Goss, believes that terrorists may bring urban warfare techniques learned in Iraq to our homeland. If he is right, we could have a whole new war on our hands. The prospect is indeed scary.
The idea of terrorist cells operating clandestinely in the United States, quietly amassing handguns and assault rifles, and planning suicide shooting rampages in our malls, is right out of Tom Clancy’s most recent novel. If not for the fact that the 9/11 attacks were also foreshadowed in a Clancy novel, I would have given the idea no further thought.
However, rather than facing this potential threat publicly, the Bush administration is only focused on terrorist attacks involving missiles, nuclear devices and biological weapons. Stopping terrorists with WMDs is a good thing, but what about the more immediate threat posed by terrorists with guns? The potential threat of terrorist attacks using guns is far more likely than any of these other scenarios.
This leads to a bigger policy issue. In the post 9/11 world where supposedly “everything has changed,” perhaps it is time for Americans to reconsider the value of public gun ownership.
The idea of public gun ownership simply does not make sense anymore. The right to bear arms, as enumerated in the Second Amendment, was meant for the maintenance of a “well-regulated militia.” At the time the amendment was adopted, standing armies were viewed with a great deal of suspicion, and therefore, gun-owning individuals were seen as a protection mechanism for the public. These gun owners were also seen as guardians of the republic against the tyranny of the rulers. The framers of the Constitution saw the right to bear and use arms as a check against an unruly government. That state of affairs no longer exists.
Today, only a handful of citizens outside of neo-nazi and white supremacist goups view gun ownership as a means of keeping the government in check. Even those citizens who continue to maintain such antiquated views must face the reality that the United States’ armed forces are too large and too powerful for the citizenry to make much difference. Quite frankly, the idea of the citizenry rising up against the U.S. government with their handguns and assault rifles, and facing the military with these personal arms is absurd. The Branch Davidian tragedy at Waco, Texas, was one such futile attempt.
The more important consideration is public safety. It is no longer safe for the public to carry guns. Gun violence is increasingly widespread in the United States. According to the DOJ/FBI’s Crime In The United States: 2003 report, 45,197 people in the United States were murdered with guns between 1999 and 2003. That averages out to more than 9,000 people murdered per year. Nearly three times the number of lives lost in the tragic 9/11 attacks are murdered annually as a direct result of guns.
Examples of wanton violence are all around. One particularly heinous incident of gun violence occurred in 1998 when former Aryan Nation member Buford Furrow shot and wounded three young boys, a teenage girl and a receptionist at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles and then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker.
Another occurred in July 1999 when white supremacist Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a member of the World Church of the Creator, went on a weekend shooting spree, targeting Blacks, Jews and Asians. By the time Smith was done he had wounded six Orthodox Jews returning from services, and killed one African-American and one Korean-American.
Just recently, in Ulster, NY, a 24 year old man carrying a Hesse Arms Model 47, an AK-47 clone assault rifle, randomly shot people in a local mall. While the Justice Department did not label this murder a terrorist attack, all the signs were there. The Ulster, New York shooting is an ominous warning of what lies ahead. Terrorism can be a homegrown act committed by anyone with a gun and is not unique to a “Middle Eastern-looking man with a bomb.” As long as the public is allowed to own guns, the threat of similar terrorist attacks remains real.
The idea of curtailing rights in the name of homeland security does not seem implausible given the current state of civil liberties in the United States. The war on terror has already taken an enormous toll on the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and thus far, very few Americans have objected. In light of this precedence, it seems reasonable that scaling back or even repealing the right to bear arms would be an easy task.
In fact, it will be a very difficult task. So far the civil liberties curtailment has affected generally disenfranchised groups such as immigrants, people of color and religious minorities. An assault on the Second Amendment will impact a much more powerful constituency.
According to the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2002 41 percent of American households owned at least one gun. According to these same statistics, 50 percent of the owners were male, 43 percent were white and 48 percent were Republican. More than 50 percent of the gun owners were college educated and earned more than $50,000 per year. Regrettably, these folks are going to marshal their considerable resources to protect their special interest.
This is a shame. Instead of laying waste to the civil rights and civil liberties that are at the core of free society, and rather than squandering precious time and money on amending the U.S. Constitution for such things as “preserving marriage between a man and woman,” the nation ought to focus its attention on the havoc guns cause in society and debate the merits of gun ownership in this era of terrorism.
So long as guns remain available to the general public, there will always be the threat of terrorists walking into a crowded restaurant, a busy coffee shop or a packed movie theater and opening fire upon unsuspecting civilians.
The Second Amendment is not worth such risks.
Junaid M. Afeef is a Research Associate at the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding. His articles are available at http://www.ispu.us.
He can be reached at junaid.afeef@gmail.com.
You should check their website. Not only are they lefties, but almost ALL of their "scholars" are Arabs.
Say a lot, don't it?
Says who?
History proves it over and over again.
My A$$!!! If anything it is even more relevant now.
This article is as disgusting as the Brady Capaign drop squads. Teams of people who seek out family of shooting victims to recruit them for camera face time to promote their anti second amendment agenda.
Perhaps these naive gun grabbers should be dropped in downtown beruit to promote their anti gun ownership naiveness.
The only rethinking which should be done is in the direction of having MORE law abiding citizens have personal arms.
They had a few cannon as well. Just not as big or with as much range as those Santa Ana had.
Safer, indeed. Canada, Britain, and even our friends in Australia have for all intents and purposes banned guns. Check their statistics on violent crime since the ban. Off the charts, and the people are beginning to ask questions, demand answers.
I love "alternative history" novels. My dream novel would be the Viking conquest of North America. If the early Vikings had had the luck of Cortez, and landed among tribes eager for allies in a fight against oppressor tribes, they might have made it. Imagine iron making, the wheel, and horses being introduced by Vikings in AD 1000!
DOMESTIC
ENEMIES
I'm at a loss for words.
Only safer for the criminals. I have had CCWs in New York and Pennsylvania but cannot seem to get one in California.
This writer is so far beyond ignorant, it takes the light from ignorant a million years to reach him...
I'm at a loss for words.
Didn't you hear? The Davidians rose up and stormed Washington, DC, trying to kill government agents, but fortunately, the US military was able to stop them. It isn't true at all that the government went to Waco, Texas, to kill women and children where they slept.
Nice to hear from you!
"The Constitution is not a Suicide Pact; it's a Living Document."
A LIVING DOCUMENT...What trash have you been reading?
Thanks. I'm writing DE pretty steadily, so I felt like I might drop in. As long as I don't over do it....
The Patriot Act, Anti-Trust legislation, Campaign Finance Reform (Social Security and Medicare Acts for that matter); every special interest has some part of the Constitution that they want to skirt.
Clever? In his own eyes, I'm sure. Not in mine, however.:-)
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Clever to the extent that he dumps his tripe on the unwashed masses... many of who will accept it as his magnificent brilliance !!! ;-))
That sounds a lot like Denis Leary.
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