James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, proposed two highly restrictive gun control bills in the Virginia legislature banning the carrying of guns outside of their owners’ property. They didn’t pass, but the effort indicates that Madison believed such laws were entirely allowed by the Constitution.
And this is not surprising. Madison was a smart guy, and regulating possession, sale, and use of deadly weapons is about the most legitimate activity imaginable for any state. For instance, Ancient Rome had strict rules about when and where weapons could be carried. Indeed, in Weberian terms, establishing control over the instruments of violence is part of what it means to be a state in the first place. The idea that a government scheme to, say, simply regulate the concealed carry of handguns is a priori illegitimate would have been regarded by all the drafters of the Constitution as staring madness. No idea so crazy would have even occurred to them.
… [T]he current American gun cult has little or nothing to do with either history, the Constitution, or plain common sense.
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Then what’s it got to do with? The writer doesn’t specify.
UD thinks that whenever America births yet another insane gun baby, the handiwork of insane gun parents, the country is afforded an opportunity to gain focus about what many observers term the gun death cult here.
You often see the simpler formulation, gun cult, as if what’s going on in the nation is tens of millions of super-enthusiastic hobbyists buying and futzing with gun collections. Indeed, while the author of this piece uses the shorter phrase throughout, he titles it THE GUN DEATH CULT, which is the correct formulation. The word death deserves pride of place because Americans both delectate death and realize that, on a practical level – as with the enthusiastically applauded assassination of a representative of a disliked insurance system – guns solve or help solve many, many problems. They are the magic wand which makes people and organizations you don’t like go poof.
If you don’t like yourself, they remove you. American rates of suicide, especially in gunny states, astound. The love of death, wedded to our famous American pragmatism, extends to a delight and fascination with your own debraining.
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We can’t get enough of the bloody pragmatics of the gun. When mass shooting isn’t really mass – see the timid Madison psychotic who gunned herself down when she heard police and therefore only had time to kill two (maybe more – two children are currently trying to survive) – we feel cheated; whereas the bold Vegas shooter who kept going until he murdered 58 and injured 500 is far more satisfying.
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Take a town like Jackson Miss. The state has by far America’s highest gun violence rate, and Jackson has the state’s highest rate of same. It’s all made possible by a fantastic synergy between white Republican politicians who don’t seem to mind an 85% black city killing itself with guns, and a black population willing to kill itself with guns. White and black may have their differences, but all embrace the cult.