The Surgeon General of the United States, recently declared that the permissive ownership of guns is includable among the major causes of mortality in the Nation and remains the leading cause of death of American young. The official declaration, effectively, catalyzed the need for this reprise on the subject.
We include ourselves among the major number of mainstream American citizens in ardent opposition to Donald Trump’s tactical practice of unabashed rejection of empirically verified facts (“truth”), in favor of “alternate facts,” or “alternative reality,” when it tends to serve one’s interest. In this context, we will reprise our position on the citizen’s purported constitutional franchise to “bear arms.” For those who remain steadfastly, factually, and reality-oriented, it merely requires a cursory inquiry into our early history to ascertain the factual answer; in contrast to the selectively construed selective, “alternative reality,” purportedly supporting such nonexistent right. The relevant history is eternally open to peruse by all, whose judgmental inclination mandates the acceptance of factual reality.
Such a revisit to the time of the establishment of our Republic reveals the existence of contention between the “Federalists,” who favored an executive central government, and the “States Righters,” who, by contrast, sought a Confederation of independent State Sovereignties. A “Sovereign,” entity, at such time, was universally, understood to constitute an independent authoritative entity, among other features, possessing the right to raise a standing army. The dispute was ultimately resolved by a mutually accepted resolution in which both parties agreed to the establishment of an executive central government, albeit, reserving the respective right of the individual States, (referred to as, “The “People”) to raise independent standing “militias” [the latter], granted the right to “bear arms.”
The eternally prevailing, well-worn, foundational meme to the effect that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, grants to “the People” the right to bear arms, reflects the franchise of all individual American citizens to be independent gunslingers, is verifiably (historically) false, but tactically and conveniently satisfies the conceptual criteria for self-serving, “alternative reality.” Uncountable events of mortal tragedy and human agony have been the proximate result of the convenient, widespread populist acceptance of this toxic fiction. In accordance with this purported meme, the neurotic need to arm oneself with an instrument capable of the maiming or death of another is included in the citizen’s free and unalienable exercise of personal liberty.
It is an incontrovertible fact, even among the most ardent practitioners of “alternate reality,” that the utility of a gun is solely limited to the potential infliction upon another of grievous injury or death. This may, as an illustration, be contrasted with the ubiquitous utility, of owning a small pocket knife, useful in activities such as opening packages, cutting fruit, and whittling. The gun’s utility, by pathological contrast, is irrefutably, limited to its singular tragic potential for grievous harm and homicide.
We have been entirely and eternally, discombobulated, with the arcane question as to why any normally socialized human being would require such an instrument of human destruction. Nevertheless, it appears that contention over the purported franchise to own such a device, apparently fueled by some animalistic desire to obtain such virile instruments, finds itself, inarguably included among the Nation’s most popular (populist?) areas of strident contention; possibly suggesting the presence of an unstudied, atavistic flaw in Humankind’s generally perceived, beneficial evolution.
-p.
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