In 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, the state-of-the-art firearm was a flintlock musket firing paper cartridges loaded with gunpowder and a lead ball. Given the laborious loading procedures, a skilled soldier could fire at most two or three shots a minute. The smoothbore flintlock lacked both stopping power and accuracy; hence the need for lines of soldiers to fire from point-blank range at each other.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-card-a:homepage/story&utm_term=.bc64ea22722f
No other country experiences this kind of terror on an ongoing basis — save places such as Afghanistan and Syria that are actually at war. The United States has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but, according to a University of Alabama researcher , between 1966 and 2012 it had 31 percent of all gunmen involved in mass shootings.
This is the excuse for inaction as our children get slaughtered? A rationale that would not convince an intelligent 12-year-old? No, Congress can’t legislate away every problem in the world, and no one is asking it to. No one even expects Congress to stop all mass shootings. But Congress has the power to make such shootings rarer and less deadly.
Politicians, primarily but not exclusively Republicans, are turning their idolatrous worship of the Second Amendment into a suicide pact. If the United States had been under assault from Muslim terrorists, they would have acted long ago. But apparently homegrown mass murderers are of scant concern even though they kill far more people than terrorists do.
No other country experiences this kind of terror on an ongoing basis — save places such as Afghanistan and Syria that are actually at war. The United States has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but, according to a University of Alabama researcher , between 1966 and 2012 it had 31 percent of all gunmen involved in mass shootings.
This is the excuse for inaction as our children get slaughtered? A rationale that would not convince an intelligent 12-year-old? No, Congress can’t legislate away every problem in the world, and no one is asking it to. No one even expects Congress to stop all mass shootings. But Congress has the power to make such shootings rarer and less deadly.
Politicians, primarily but not exclusively Republicans, are turning their idolatrous worship of the Second Amendment into a suicide pact. If the United States had been under assault from Muslim terrorists, they would have acted long ago. But apparently homegrown mass murderers are of scant concern even though they kill far more people than terrorists do.
