After the shooting - Don't take away guns; give more hope

The current travesty of the massacre in Connecticut causes me to resurrect an opinion I first aired several years ago. I’m afraid our country is going to over-react in a fit of rage because this tragedy happened. I would like to state that this is a classic situation of “one size does not fit all.”

Big-city American culture and rural American culture are entirely different… so much so that we are two opposing societies with competing world views. Trying to pass laws that simultaneously satisfy both cultural needs is impossible.

As our country’s population continues to grow at a rapid pace, the contentious issue of gun control will always rear its ugly head. Rural American communities with small populations do not have the large police forces to protect them that exist in densely populated big city American communities.

People from large cities contend with higher crime rates that involve guns: Armed robberies, gang shootings, domestic violence, bar fights, sexual assaults, work place disputes, school massacres, et al, not to mention home accidents. They develop a justified prejudice against guns, whereas the ownership of guns in rural America is accepted as commonplace for legal game hunting purposes and for home self-defense use in country settings with limited police protection. The two different cultures are necessarily going to clash over control of gun ownership... because “one size doesn’t fit all.”

How to resolve the problematic clash of wills in establishing impending gun-control legislation? Perhaps the answer is to refocus our attention on the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment “right to bear arms” and what its original intended purposes were:

1. Allowing the citizenry to bear arms prevents us from becoming a police state, where unarmed citizens would be at the mercy of our own government taking over as a renegade dictatorship. Our founding forefathers certainly did not want that to happen, and neither do we today. There are many atrocities occurring in other countries around the world where the unarmed people suffer genocide at the hands of their own armed government militia. Fortunately, it cannot happen here.

2. Allowing the citizenry to bear arms prevents us from becoming conquered by a foreign government in the event our government ever surrenders to them as a result of a war. We are 300 million people in America with an average of eight guns per household and can never be successfully occupied by a foreign army on our own soil.

3. Everyone is entitled to defend themselves, their family, their home, and their property as a right of citizenship in America.

Of course the Founding Fathers did not foresee the threat of jihadist religious fanatics, not representing any country/state, crossing our borders, or the power of modern-day assault weapons that the NRA would demand become available to ordinary citizens. These are special, complicated applications for our laws to deal with.

We unfortunately do suffer the collateral damage of unacceptable loss of human life due to crimes committed with guns in our society, and my beloved wildlife do get hunted, but the alternative of not having guns to defend ourselves is a far worse scenario to live with. It could mean the loss of all of our freedoms we cherish above all else.

So what do we do about these recurring massacres? Is it guns that kill or people that kill?

In my opinion it is classical class warfare at the root cause. The “have nots” are losing their will to cope with our country’s huge economic divide between them and the “haves.” The “haves” learned nothing from reading about the French Revolution where the poor class rose up and stormed the Bastille and took everything away from the rich “haves” class.

When people get overly distraught with their hopelessly poor lot in life they may “snap” and go on a rampage. We need to become a more understanding, caring society and not kick poor, less fortunate people when they are down, but rather give them opportunities and incentives to keep on truckin’ and stay in the game. The humiliation of poverty does not belong in American society. It puts everyone at risk.

The wealthy elitists, who mostly obtained their extreme wealth through unearned family inheritance and/or cheating in business, need to be reined in and the more honorable poor and middle classes (94 percent) need to be provided fairer opportunities to compete and succeed against that more corrupt upper class.

Gun control is not the answer to our nation’s ills, eliminating the psychological crush of poverty is. Don’t take people’s guns away from them, but rather restructure the unfair tax laws for the lower and middle classes and then punish white-collar crime in the business world as ferociously as we do blue-collar crime in the streets. Fairness in all aspects of a humanitarian society will go a long way to eliminating some of the reasons for these massacres.

That is the answer.

Bill Baum is a resident of Martin City.