“It feels like the flag is at half mast every other week” I once lamented morosely to a friend in high school. She nodded solemnly in agreement as we both looked out the window at the listless red, white, and blue cloth, which limply fell at the midpoint of the flagpole and symbolized everything that we, as Americans, claim to hold so dearly. I can’t remember which national tragedy prompted this brief moment of introspection- if it was September 16th, 2016, when 12 people were killed in the Washington Navy Yard Shooting, or if it was December 2nd, 2012, 14 killed and 22 injured in San Bernardino, California. It definitely preceded June 12th, 2016, when 49 people were murdered in the Orlando nightclub shooting, but it followed July 20th, 2012, when 12 moviegoers were killed, and 70 injured in Aurora, Colorado. Perhaps it was in the wake of December 14th, 2012, the Newtown shooting that stole the lives of twenty seven people, twenty of whom were first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary school, that I gazed at the stars and the stripes and wondered how a nation- especially one founded upon the guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness- could repeatedly facilitate the violation of those very natural rights.
Ironically, people who advocate for gun rights claim to do so in the name of patriotism and liberty, yet in effect, they attack the natural rights to which every American is entitled, and they precipitate the deaths of those same citizens whom they’re claiming to protect. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The trajectory of American progress throughout history has been marked by efforts to legitimize this declaration: expanding the definition of “all men,” advancing equality, and as is pertinent right now, securing that inalienable right to life.
Something that makes America “the land of the free,” and one of the pillars of our democracy, is a recognition of the fact that the constitution is not a stationary document; it lives and breathes and evolves with the rest of the country. The second amendment protects the right to bear arms, but the “arms” the founding father spoke of 1787 are not the same destructive weapons to which people have access today, just as blacks constitute more than three-fifths of a person, and women are active participants in public life. Strengthening gun control would not be an affront to one’s liberty, but an expression of it; it is a textbook example of the democratic process at work and the power of “we the people” to improve our nation. The Philosopher John Locke, who inspired Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, believed in a social contract between the government and the governed. He proclaimed that citizens must relinquish some of their unchecked freedoms in exchange for the right to be governed with laws and protections, but that in doing so, the people should still retain their natural rights: life, liberty, and what Jefferson would change to the pursuit of happiness. When applied to gun control, this means it is our patriotic responsibility to sacrifice some of our freedom to own and acquire dangerous weapons, in order to secure the right to life for all Americans. There is nothing tyrannical about protecting what the forefathers called unalienable rights endowed by the creator. Gun control is as American as baseball and apple pie.
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2087
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snowghoul
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