Should Gun Owners Have to Join the Reserves?

By Ozy EditorsOCT 222013
POV
Why you should care

http://www.ozy.com/pov/should-gun-owners-have-to-join-the-reserves/1412

Because in some states in America, gun deaths are now as common as motor vehicle fatalities.


It’s time for American gun-control advocates to face facts: The latest attempt at reform was over before the Bushmaster rifle that Adam Lanza used to murder 26 teachers and children at Sandy Hook Elementary School had cooled. No matter how gruesome the carnage from the latest shooting, any attempt to meaningfully limit the number of guns or gun owners in the U.S. will be met by overwhelming firepower from the NRA, the Supreme Court and the millions of Americans who oppose restrictions on a time-honored right. In Colorado, two Democrats who backed tough gun-control laws were ousted in a special election . It was just another defeat for gun-control moderates. Every gun-control battle that’s lost drives up demand for more firearms and further lines the pockets of gun manufacturers.

If you can’t bear the responsibility of bearing a firearm, then perhaps you shouldn’t be bearing one.


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“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.” The Second Amendment expressly links an individual’s right to bear arms to the broader need to secure the public’s safety. In other words, with that right comes a corresponding responsibility, and if you can’t bear the responsibility of bearing a firearm, then perhaps you shouldn’t be bearing one.
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Doesn’t it make sense that any American seeking to own a gun should be required to make a pledge to abide by the spirit of the Second Amendment and man a post? After all, the founding fathers specifically contemplated actual militias in conferring the right. As Fordham University historian Saul Cornell reminds us, the Constitution focuses more on maintaining citizen militias than protecting individual rights, and “what’s easy to forget is that the Second Amendment actually poses an enormous burden on the citizenry.”
gun

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Asking prospective gun owners to enlist in the reserves would certainly help separate the true patriots from those who merely dress like them on the weekends. It would also ensure that every gun owner receives proper weapons training, gets screened for mental or emotional issues and comes away with a deeper sense of duty to his community. This approach has worked in Switzerland, where gun ownership is coupled with mandatory (male) service and they have one-tenth the number of gun deaths we have in the U.S., even though the Swiss own about half as many guns per capita as Americans.

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Warren — at the time a Harvard law professor — recounted how, in the 1990s, she wrote an editorial opposing a proposed piece of legislation tightening bankruptcy laws. Warren explained that it would disproportionately hurt single mothers. Hillary Clinton, at the time the first lady, read the editorial, and asked for a meeting with Warren. The meeting went well; Warren said she “never had a smarter student.” Afterward, Clinton returned to Washington and, according to her biography, persuaded Bill Clinton to veto the legislation.

But when Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate and another version of the same bill came to the floor, she did an about face:

ELIZABETH WARREN: She voted in favor of it.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

ELIZABETH WARREN: As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different. It’s a well-financed industry. You know a lot of people don’t realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry, was not pharmaceuticals. It was consumer credit products. Those are the people. The credit card companies have been giving money, and they have influence.

BILL MOYERS: And Mrs. Clinton was one of them as senator.

ELIZABETH WARREN: She has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.

BILL MOYERS: But what does this mean though to these people, these millions of people out there whom the politicians cavort in front of as favoring the middle class, and then are beholden to the powerful interests that undermine the middle class? What does this say about politics today?

ELIZABETH WARREN: You know this is the scary part about democracy today. It’s… We’re talking again about the impact of money. The credit industry on this bankruptcy bill has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying, and as their profits grow, they just throw more into lobbying for how they can get laws that will make it easier and easier and easier to drain money out of the pockets of middle class families.