why is there no right to drive a car in the constitution, yet more people drive cars than own guns.
yet the state owns the right to put you in prison if you drive a car and they say you cant.
surely the right to drive a car to work to earn money is far more important to a capitalist society than a right to own machine guns and rocket launchers ?
Even without the homicide cult otherwise known as the NRA mucking things up, the Second Amendment has tended to complicate the discussion; it will continue to do so, of course, but it will be a much different discussion when it is actually about the right to bear arms instead of the right to kill with guns. We become so accustomed to some things the NRA says, like comparisons of guns to cars, kitchen knives, and pencils.
There is an old episode of
The Simpsons (#5F01, "The Cartridge Family") in which Homer buys a gun for self-derfense, and comes to recognize his firearm is a "tool", whereupon he wanders around the house using the firearm to put out the lights and turn off the television, eventually horrifying other alleged responsible gun owners by using his tool to open a beer. And of course his friends in the NRA react appropriately, are horrified. These years later, though, it's hard to tell what to think; the NRA argument often sounds that simplistic and stupid, and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, recently uttered one of the great kinsley gaffes of all time, denouncing Democrats as the Party of Lisa Simpson while proudly touting the GOP as the Party of Homer Simpson.
While it is true I find the car comparison inappropriate, the firearms lobby really has insisted; the common sense of the comparison is disrupted, for gun safety advocates because it never was a legitimate comparison, and firearms advocates because decades have passed and they still haven't figured out basic questions of function. They need to show us how to ride their guns to work, and mounting them on a car doesn't count. They need to show how they write a novel, or take the SAT (#2 pencil only), with a gun.
Nonetheless, even if we didn't have
this Church of Stupid the NRA to deal with, there is still the Second Amendment, which in turn we Americans have made a nasty mess of through the years. It's complicated, but there is no explicit right to transportation the way there is a firearm. I would recommend that when people seek their concealed-carry permits, they also explore what is required to legally pack a concealed knife; I actually don't
know what they will find, but twenty-five years ago, or so, in Oregon, I happened to ask a cop why it seemed like it wasn't possible to legally pack a concealed knife; the answer was that the police were more afraid of knives than guns. Nor do I know that it is still true; it had to do with the idea that assailants are less likely to miss if they keep the knife hidden until close, while idiots and willful criminals alike tend to show their guns early.
I would ask cops different questions these days.
Still, though, American morality
is complicated and neurotic to the point that the phrase itself, "American morality", seems farcical. But the keeping and bearing of arms is a specifically enumerated
right. We argue that it is a privilege to own and drive a car, but some part of that argument is arbitrary, and when we get into the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, there may well be a right to keep and bear automobiles, but we do not presently recognize it. Indeed, the states themselves are allowed to require you to trade out federal constitutional rights in exchange for the privilege of driving, and, technically speaking, that isn't supposed to happen. Additionally, raw democracy is sometimes found in how people define words, and a good deal of that is traditionalistic. One of the questions I might ask the police, these days, is the difference 'twixt the inherent danger of an unarmed black man walking away and rolling out on a domestic violence call. And when we see how our definitions of words and traditionalistic outlooks on humanity and necessity result in the need for cops to be able to just not be able to restrain themselves from shooting the wrong black man—because, apparently, the officer absolutely needed to shoot one of the two black men who weren't a threat to him, and, yes, really, in that one the officer's excuse was that he accidentally shot the wrong person—it becomes easier to see how the right to kill without accountability gets bound up in the right to bear arms, and that homicidal temptation is a fundamental component of the traditional American outlook on firearms as an identity symbol.
(For precision, true automatic weapons are exceptionally difficult to obtain, and while our societal relationship with explosives is its own set of mysteries, rocket launchers are particularly reserved to formal, state-sponsored militias. There are probably a few proper mortars left in circulation, and they're easy enough to rig, but they are impractical for personal defense, and I just can't quite explain how hilariously the idea of a drive-by shelling strikes me; for some reason I'm suddenly surprised to have never heard of one.)
