When I was a kid, during the ages surrounding ten, my friends and I would often engage in our own form of the Civil War. I almost always ended up as a Confederate, not because I drew the short straw, but because I wanted to. It had absolutely nothing to do with race and slavery. Growing up in a small town in Wyoming, I had no concrete concept of any of that. The color gray was simply more appealing to me. It seemed like a more dominant color, an earthy color that could kick the crap out of blue. I understood by that time in my life that historically gray came out on the short end of things, but that was not a concern of mine then. I was ten and playing a game. It was played with squirt guns and water balloons, and incorporated a version of capture the flag, and I won my share of battles. By the time I was twelve or so, our neighborhood game of Civil War ended. Of course there was no official surrender with a signed document or anything. We all just moved on with our lives.
I don’t have a lot going on, so I spend a good portion of the day in reflection about stuff like this. And so many times my thoughts about the innocent and carefree experiences of my life, both past and present, get completely steamrolled by absurdly cruel and horrific current events. The massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church is yet another example of the type of craziness that overwhelms what I believe to be my normally adjusted mind, to the point where I begin to question what is real or imaginary. That this much prejudice and hatred can still exist, especially in this country, is incomprehensible to me. And don’t get me started on gun control. Sorry. What I should say is once again I’m going to get started on gun control. Certainly the actions of the person that committed this atrocity wandered beyond racism and into the realm of psychotic delusion. And that points to the fact we do need better mental health care, not only here but everywhere on the planet. But right there is your “catch 22,” and the NRA does not understand it to be a catch. You must be insane to use a gun to kill innocent people, but insane people are allowed to buy guns. And even if we could lock up all the clinically diagnosed psychotics, there would still be plenty of marginal nut-jobs out there that would make accounting for all impossible. Sure, maybe we can make some slight progress in helping the unstable, but we can make significant progress in reducing firearm tragedy by implementing very strict laws and practices of control. We should make the purchase of a hand gun or assault rifle so difficult most will give up trying. Do what they do in Canada and Australia. Require a psychological exam and some third party references. I would take it one step further. Every prospective buyer should be subjected to a polygraph test, and I suggest one electrode be genitally attached and capable of emitting an electrically charged reminder of the seriousness of the matter should a lie be told.
And to those entrenched in second amendment protection, I say it’s time to seriously debate it’s intension and interpretation. Times change. Things evolve. The four simple words “keep and bear arms” part of this amendment is way too broad of a statement in today’s crazy world if you ask me. Every president, and practically every presidential candidate, will declare, in one speech or another, that the most important task of the position is to keep us, the citizens, safe, and to uphold the constitution while they are at it. The second amendment is the only statement in the constitution that mentions weapons specifically. If the founding fathers had known at the time there would be this much mayhem caused by firearms, I think their wording of it would have been more carefully crafted. Hunt game all you want. You are doing all of us that take an evening drive along state highways a huge favor if you bag a deer. But assault rifles belong in the hands of trained military personnel, and if you feel it is your right to own a handgun for self protection, alright. But keep the damn thing in your house. Home invasion and burglary are one thing, but outside of the police force no one should be walking around with a hand gun. If we get serious about penalties for crimes committed with a handgun, the misplaced paranoia over the need to carry one in public would drastically diminish. If the underlying purpose of the second amendment is to make us all safe, it is, at present, failing miserably.
And this Confederate battle flag business, come on! Maybe even worse than South Carolina allowing the thing to fly on it’s capital grounds is Mississippi’s incorporation of it in their official state flag. It is a symbolic and absolutely offensive reminder of an absolutely embarrassing and inhumane time in our country. Read the Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal. Thomas Jefferson himself, though a slave owner, tried to discourage the practice of slavery in a number of ways. He and many others of the Revolutionary War era understood it was wrong. The ultimate recognition of this fact was a bloody civil war, and ever so slowly most came to acknowledge the injustice of the peculiar practice and as a nation we gradually came to our senses. There is something terribly wrong with someone that holds some sort of reverence for an image that symbolizes acts committed by mankind that in many respects parallel those that come to mind when we see the flag of Nazi Germany. Hopefully those that still embrace this symbol are unmindful of its insulting stigma and are merely trying to naively cling to a simpler time represented by the colors blue and gray. But it is 2015. It’s time to put those boyhood fantasies aside and move on.
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