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IOWA VIEW / IVAN T. WEBBER
Gun control: Repeal 2nd Amendment
In the film "Lion in Winter," Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine,
played by Katharine Hepburn, tells her young son John, who is complaining about being
attacked by his knife-carrying brother Richard, "We all have knives. It's 1183
and we're barbarians, how clear we make it."
For the second time this fall a gun-carrying teen-ager has killed
classmates, this time in Kentucky. We are used to this. We are no longer
outraged by such acts. We are immune and accepting. Would the line for a new
"Lion in Winter" be "Guns are everywhere. It's 1997 and we're
barbarians, how clear we make it"?
Columnist Donald Kaul had it right a few years ago when he observed
that there are countries fighting full-scale civil wars with lower body counts from
gunfire than the United States has while at peace.
It is instructive to compare the last two school shootings in the
United States with the tragedy at the Scottish elementary school. The British were
shocked. It was the sort of thing one would expect in America. Indeed, such
strange happenings are so rare in Britain that the head of state, Queen Elizabeth,
attended a memorial service and extended the condolences of the nation to the grieving.
These murders in American schools will not make a ripple in President Clinton's
obligations as head of state.
We have come to the point where we accept that innocent people doing
their jobs at the University of Iowa will be killed by guns, where people working in law
offices will be murdered, postal workers slaughtered, people eating in restaurants shot
and California schoolchildren will be mowed down all in the name of some twisted concept
of freedom and rights.
We are not a safe country. Our country has become a nation
holding on to its civilization while camps of lunatics and marauders wander among us armed
to the teeth with the most sophisticated and dangerous of high-tech weapons. The
causes, in the sense that sociologists speak of causes, for this problem are many.
Certainly violent people cannot blame the rest of us for their act of deadly aggression.
But as complicated as the causes are, the solution is simple. We
need look no farther than Canada, Western Europe or Japan for the results of effective
gun-control laws. And the reason we do not have effective gun-control laws is the
political clout of the National Rifle Association, its lobbyists, political lackeys and
fellow travelers. These defenders of the barbarians among us have blocked every
effort at real national gun control. They have flexed their muscle in the Iowa
legislature so that the home-rule rights of the people who live in Iowa's cities do not
extend to reasonable regulation of firearms. The blood of 20,000 Americans a year is
sacrificed to the perverted altar of the National Rifle Association.
Perverted? Yes. The National Rifle Association and its
allies have hidden themselves behind an at best doubtful reading of the Second Amendment
as protecting individual rights of gun ownership (as opposed to the rights of the states
to maintain militias) to give to its position a perverted form of constitutional sanctity.
This neat trick has also kept focus away from the tragedy of the present bloodbath
by allowing gutless politicians a sanctimonious position from which to make noble sounds
about the nation's traditions while gunshot wounds have become the leading cause of death
for inner-city youth.
The response is obvious. Repeal the Second Amendment. Even
talking about repeal will at least move the discussion to the right arena.
Discussion of repeal will also make it plain to those who see nothing wrong with 20,000
deaths a year that they must either accede to reasonable gun control or be faced with gun
prohibition.
Freedom and rights are guaranteed in an ordered, civilized society to
protect lives and property, not destroy them. Our constitutional system allows us to
change even constitutional strictures that have become destructive. The choice is
between civil peace and continuing civil violence that costs 20,000 lives a year.
Or if that is too much, then think of the choice as between a system in
which young people can safely gather in a circle to pray and one in which guns are so
easily obtained that even the most gentle of our young can have their lives taken by a
teen-ager with a high-tech weapon.
IVAN T. WEBBER is a Des Moines attorney.
The Des Moines Register, Tuesday, December 23, 1997, Page 11A
Fax 515-286-2511 * Email: letters@news.dmreg.com