Robert Parry: The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids
from Consortium News:
The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids
December 15, 2012
Exclusive: As Americans reel in shock over the slaughter of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, defenders of gun rights insist, in effect, that such deaths are part of the price of liberty enshrined by the Framers in the Second Amendment. But this was not what James Madison had in mind, argues Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of Americas Founders and intuiting what was their original intent in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendments right to bear arms. But, surely, James Madison and the others werent envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children in a movie theater or a shopping mall or now a kindergarten.
Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the right to bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.
The Second Amendment reads: 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. Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure security, not undermine it.
The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of security. And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind. .................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/15/the-2nd-amendment-and-killing-kids/