Standing Up for the Second Amendment
On the morning of December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot his mother four times as she lay in her bed. Then he drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 26 more people—20 students, nearly all of them first-graders, and six staff members. When first responders arrived, Lanza shot himself. In the wake of this terrible crime, many Americans urged their lawmakers to further restrict citizens’ access to weapons. In particular, gun control advocates wanted legislators to require universal background checks, ban the sale of assault-style weapons, and limit the size of magazines for semi-automatic weapons. Writing less than a week after the event, Joshua Horwitz, the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop …show more content…
S. Constitution. The entire text of the Second Amendment is “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.” Some people believe that ever since America has maintained a standing army, militias have become obsolete, and therefore the Second Amendment may now be ignored. However, the framers of the Constitution clearly wanted the citizenry to be armed. They wanted citizens to be able to band together to defend themselves against any sort of threat, whether it be criminals, foreign invaders, or a tyrannical central government. Several court decisions, notably Moore v. Madigan (2012) and Peruta v. San Diego (2014), have interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that citizens must be permitted to carry, and have ready access to, concealed weapons for the purposes of self-defense. According to recent polls, the American public agrees with the judges. In a 2012 Thomson Reuters poll, 75% of Americans support making the carrying of concealed handguns legal, and in a 2013 CBS News poll, 65% oppose laws which restrict the carrying of concealed handguns to law enforcement personnel. The framers of the Constitution wrote the Bill of Rights to forever protect certain enumerated rights that the government could …show more content…
On one side are well-intentioned liberals who believe that problems, like the shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School, are best solved by government passing new laws and placing more restrictions on its citizens. On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who believe that the people these new laws are intended to thwart are unlikely to follow them. The true believers on both sides of the issue care deeply about the outcome of this argument. However, I believe that everyone should care about gun control. For one reason, crime affects us all. Even if you manage to avoid being the victim of a gun crime, our social fabric is being tattered and frayed by violence and crime, diminishing the quality of our lives. But even more important, every American citizen is heir to a centuries-old tradition of liberty and rights. Trading liberty and rights away in return for a false sense of security is a bad idea, one that we will regret only when it’s too late to reclaim our
On the morning of December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza shot his mother four times as she lay in her bed. Then he drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 26 more people—20 students, nearly all of them first-graders, and six staff members. When first responders arrived, Lanza shot himself. In the wake of this terrible crime, many Americans urged their lawmakers to further restrict citizens’ access to weapons. In particular, gun control advocates wanted legislators to require universal background checks, ban the sale of assault-style weapons, and limit the size of magazines for semi-automatic weapons. Writing less than a week after the event, Joshua Horwitz, the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop …show more content…
S. Constitution. The entire text of the Second Amendment is “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.” Some people believe that ever since America has maintained a standing army, militias have become obsolete, and therefore the Second Amendment may now be ignored. However, the framers of the Constitution clearly wanted the citizenry to be armed. They wanted citizens to be able to band together to defend themselves against any sort of threat, whether it be criminals, foreign invaders, or a tyrannical central government. Several court decisions, notably Moore v. Madigan (2012) and Peruta v. San Diego (2014), have interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that citizens must be permitted to carry, and have ready access to, concealed weapons for the purposes of self-defense. According to recent polls, the American public agrees with the judges. In a 2012 Thomson Reuters poll, 75% of Americans support making the carrying of concealed handguns legal, and in a 2013 CBS News poll, 65% oppose laws which restrict the carrying of concealed handguns to law enforcement personnel. The framers of the Constitution wrote the Bill of Rights to forever protect certain enumerated rights that the government could …show more content…
On one side are well-intentioned liberals who believe that problems, like the shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School, are best solved by government passing new laws and placing more restrictions on its citizens. On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who believe that the people these new laws are intended to thwart are unlikely to follow them. The true believers on both sides of the issue care deeply about the outcome of this argument. However, I believe that everyone should care about gun control. For one reason, crime affects us all. Even if you manage to avoid being the victim of a gun crime, our social fabric is being tattered and frayed by violence and crime, diminishing the quality of our lives. But even more important, every American citizen is heir to a centuries-old tradition of liberty and rights. Trading liberty and rights away in return for a false sense of security is a bad idea, one that we will regret only when it’s too late to reclaim our