On December 14th, 2012 Adam Lanza age twenty, walked freely into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut equipped with three of his mother's legally owned guns fatally shooting twenty children, six staff members and wounding two others. Before driving to the school, Lanza shot and killed his own mother, Nancy Lanza who was a teacher at the school, at there home early that morning. Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head as first responders arrived. These tragic events sparked national horror and endless headlines that provoked a combative debate on the topic of gun control in the United States.
The Second Amendment is a twenty-seven word statement that was written approximately two hundred and thirty six years ago in a beautiful rococo font, which I presume was actualized with a sumptuous plume pen commanded by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself. Some will retain the notion that the twenty seven word statement or whatever you will call it contains immeasurable interpretations. As it turns out, after more than 200 years of intense scrutiny by people far more au courant in The Law than you and I, and in the face of an endless American gun violence problem, the meaning of the Second Amendment continues to baffle and elude. With the tragic multiple shootings recently in Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut and other places getting so much attention, confidants and adversaries of guns are, as usual, pushing and shoving each other. And the Second Amendment, also as usual, is caught right in the thick of it. By this point of the essay you may be wondering what those magical twenty seven words are that are causing all this entropy in society. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is exactly what Mr. Jefferson penned onto his paper. This would later be ratified and signed by thirty-nine other enlightened delegates of the Constitutional Congress. Now some will argue that those twenty seven words contain an immeasurable amount of interpretations. Somehow lost in the midst of all this drama I feel sure, almost positive, that the same people who were the brain power behind over throwing the most powerful empire on planet earth-up until then at least- meant what they said when they wrote it.
The Second Amendment was not created so all the multitudes of people who are citizens and call The United States of America home could control the local deer population and have Sunday fun-day family hunts. The Second Amendment was in fact created so that the American people could not only defend themselves against a self imposed tyrannical government- if such a thing were to ever occur, but also to defend themselves against psychopaths who decide they feel its necessary to pop out their bushmaster and plow down innocent people. The founding fathers in all their infinite wisdom must have noticed that sometime in the past 10,000 years humans killing other humans businesses were a boom-in, even though there had been laws against that sort of outlandish behavior in every civilization civilized or not- since the time of Moses and his Ten Commandments. The Founding Fathers decided to allow the people of the newly founded free country to be able to defend themselves since the people trying to kill people rates weren't really moving down in the history poles. They also did this to ensure that a government couldn't get to out of hand without a quick response from the people to remind them of who's in charge- because everybody knows how power can be a funny little thing.
Most people today including myself and I presume many of my young witty piers who are swaddled tightly in cloaks of security, would almost make it a laughing matter to think that they would need a gun at all, but more so that they would need a gun to protect themselves against their own government. I mean come on what do we live in 1776, this is the