Over at Salon, liberal columnist Heather Digby Parton has a nice article on how the interpretation of the Second Amendment has morphed from what’s pretty clearly stated in the Constitution as the perquisites of a militia into today’s let-a-gazillion-guns-blossom attitude.  Almost every week some disaffected person with a gun kills innocent people. I think this happened three times in the last two weeks.  (For an earlier take on the National Rifle Association’s (NRA)—and many Americans’—misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, see Garry Wills’s article in the 2005 New York Review of Books, “To keep and bear arms.”)

Here’s the Second Amendment:

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.

What part of “a well regulated Militia” doesn’t the Supreme Court understand? If James Madison or George Mason, or any of the people who drew up the Bill of Rights could see what it’s led to in this country,  could see the school killings and gang violence and “stand your ground” laws, would they agree with the amendment’s current interpretation?

At any rate, I won’t reiterate Parton’s piece except to give two excerpts from it:

Justice John Paul Stephens discussed his long experience with Second Amendment jurisprudence in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” and notes that when he came on the Supreme Court there was literally no debate among the justices, conservative or liberal, over the idea that the Second Amendment constituted a “fundamental right” to bear arms. Precedents going all the way back to the beginning of the republic had held that the state had an interest in regulating weapons and never once in all its years had declared a “fundamental right” in this regard.

So, what happened? Well, the NRA happened. Or more specifically, a change in leadership in the NRA happened. After all, the NRA had long been a benign sportsman’s organization devoted to hunting and gun safety. It wasn’t until 1977, that a group of radicals led by activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took control and changed the direction of the group to one dedicated to making the Second Amendment into a “fundamental right.”

What had been a fringe ideology was then systematically mainstreamed by the NRA, a program that prompted the retired arch conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger to say that the Second Amendment:

“Has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”

The results are clear to see. Mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg. Today we have people brandishing guns in public, daring people to try to stop them in the wake of new laws legalizing open carry law even in churches, bars and schools. People “bearing arms” show up at political events, silently intimidating their opponents, making it a physical risk to express one’s opinion in public. They are shooting people with impunity under loose “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” legal theories, which essentially allow gun owners to kill people solely on the ground that they “felt threatened.” Gun accidents are epidemic. And this, the gun proliferation activists insist, is “liberty.”

One of the scariest things to me is how NRA members and gun nuts sometimes descend en masse to public venues, demonstrating their right to “open carry” weapons. Here’s one in a Texas Wal-Mart. What you see below is perfectly  legal:

Sometimes five or six guys—they’re always men—enter a store together, all with rifles. Only a country that’s deeply screwed up could allow something like this. And open carry, with or without a permit, is legal in 32 of the 50 states.

At any rate, in his book, Stevens, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, proposes a clarification of the Second Amendment that would fix everything. He first gives the fix (my emphasis) and then analyzes it:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.

I still believe that guns should be banned for private ownership, with the possible exception of shooting sports like target shooting (in which case they can be locked up at gun clubs), and perhaps to protect yourself in the wilderness from bears, or to cull animals when it’s absolutely necessary to control their populations. But not for anything else.

This is all a fantasy, of course, for Americans are deeply enamored of their firearms. But things would be a whole lot better if we handled the issue like the British do.

The NRA is evil—pure, unadulterated evil. There is no massacre so horrible that it would make them reconsider their policy. In fact, massacres of innocents only stimulate them to tell us that we need more guns.

From #Truthful Tuesday:

Now we can sit back and wait for the gun apologists to come over here crying, “That’s an unfair comparison.” They’re like theologians in their ability to explain away any malfeasance caused by their favorite toys.

Richard Martinez, whose son died in the Santa Barbara massacre, gives an emotional interview to CNN. This breaks my heart.

It keeps happening over and over again.  Six people, including several students at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), were killed by a deranged, 22-year-old student from another school, Elliott Rodger,Thirteen people were injured as well, and apparently Rodger killed himself as the cops closed in.

One of those killed was Christopher Martinez, a 20-year-old student at UCSB who was inside a deli. His father, Richard Martinez, gave this angry and moving speech at a press conference yesterday.

Yes, Rodger had serious problems, but serious problems for someone like him become deep tragedies for others when guns are readily available.  It’s time to stop the madness, and quash the power of the nefarious National Rifle Association, which simply sees these deaths as a byproduct of our ineluctable right to own guns.  The Second Amendment should either be construed as the right to own guns in a militia, or it should be overturned. That won’t happen, of course, for, when it comes to guns, Americans have lost their senses.

Can you hear the heartbreak in Mr. Martinez’s voice and not think that the NRA’s position, and the general American penchant for guns, is deeply dysfunctional? It is unbelievable but true that if many Americans had their way, the situation would be worse—all the way up to our right to own fully automatic weapons and portable missile launchers. Will that stop the slaughter of innocent people? I haven’t heard the NRA offer a solution.

The U.S. has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world: 88 guns per 100 people (that’s scary!). And no, we don’t have the highest rate of gun-induced homicide in the world—there are other social factors affecting these statistics—but it’s way up there.

Imagine if we had the same strict gun-ownership policies as England, where the rate of homicide by firearms is only 2%  that of the U.S., and there are only 6.2 firearms per 100 people.

If you’re going to weigh in below on the side of the NRA, then please give me your solution to the problem of these recurrent killings.

This country is going nuts: Georgia’s governor Nathan Deal signed a really, really dumb gun bill today. From The Hill (you can see the bill at the link; my emphasis):

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed sweeping gun legislation on Wednesday that some have described as unprecedented.

Licensed gun owners will be able to carry their firearms into public places including bars, schools, churches and government buildings, among other areas.

The NRA called House Bill 60, The Safe Carry Protection Act, “the most comprehensive pro-gun bill in state history.”

Georgia’s legislature passed it at the end of this year’s session, and Deal told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it had support from both Republicans and Democrats.

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“There are always opportunities for people to use any piece of legislation as a political tool if they don’t like it. But there was bipartisan support for the bill,” he said.

State Sen. Jason Carter (D), grandson of former President Jimmy Carter and his party’s gubernatorial nominee, voted for the bill and told MSNBC last week he believes he helped “make the bill better than it was when it first started.”

Two proposals that did not make it into the bill include a provision that would have legalized the carrying of guns on college campuses, and one that would have required houses of worship to allow guns unless leaders ban them.

Bars, schools, and government buildings (which presumably include courthouses): that’s just where you want a bunch of people with guns.

And, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it gets worse: the cops aren’t allowed to stop anyone carrying a weapon to see if they have a permit. (Apparently they can ask the person to show up later in court to show the permit, but that won’t keep someone without a license to wreak some havoc before their presumed court appearance.)

I don’t understand the mentality that can favor something like this—guns in bars and schools, for crying out loud—and am deeply disappointed that Carter’s grandson favored this insane legislation.