Sadness for a Good Man Leaving After a Life Well Lived Contrasted With the Sadness for Victims of Mass Murders Gone Before Their Time
by John Lawrence
Prince Philip lived a good, successful and honorable life to the age of 99. It is sad to see him go, but that is tempered by the nobility of his life and the fact that we all have to go at some time. On the other hand, the US is in the throes of mass murders on a daily basis killing people senselessly before their time on earth was up. Is there nostalgia for a monarchy to replace the chaos that the descendants of the rebels against the British monarchy have created? Did the emphasis on liberty and the Second Amendment make this inevitable? Now we have politicians whose sole purpose in life is to fund raise off the chaos that they themselves have created. The First and Second Amendments are killing us. That includes the "peaceful protests" that turn into rioting and looting when the sum goes down. God save the queen.
The US is alone in the civilized world with an unrestricted right to gun ownership. The only other countries which have a right to bear arms written into their Constitution are Mexico and Guatemala, Six other countries used to have a constitutional right to bear arms, but they've since repealed those laws. The US should do the same. The US is the only country with a right to keep and bear arms with no constitutional restrictions. Americans own nearly half of all the civilian-owned guns in the world, and on a per capita basis, the US has far more guns than any other nation.
Just south of the US border, the Mexican government has a strict hold over civilian gun ownership. Although Mexicans have a right to buy a gun, bureaucratic hurdles, long delays, and narrow restrictions make it extremely difficult to do so. Article 10 of the 1857 Mexican Constitution guaranteed that "every man has the right to keep and to carry arms for his security and legitimate defense." But 60 years later in 1917, lawmakers amended it following Mexico's bloody revolution. During the rewriting of the constitution, the government placed more severe restrictions on the right to buy guns. The law precluded citizens from buying firearms "reserved for use by the military" and forbid them from carrying "arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations." Today, Mexicans still have a right to buy guns, but they must contend with a vague federal law that determines "the cases, conditions, requirements, and places in which the carrying of arms will be authorized."
In Guatemala individuals who want to purchase a gun for private security purposes need approval from the government. They are also limited in how much ammunition they can own, and they must re-apply and re-qualify for their firearm licenses every one to three years, according to GunPolicy.org. A license also requires proof that the applicant has a clean police record, does not suffer from mental illness, and has not deserted the army or police. Although Guatemalans are not allowed to own fully automatic weapons, they are allowed to buy semi-automatic weapons, handguns, rifles, and shotguns if they obtain a permit. Still, that can be difficult.
Although Mexico and Guatemala both have a constitutional right to bear arms, the US is in a league of its own, because it is the only country without any restrictions on gun ownership in its Constitution. The US makes up 4.4 percent of the world’s population but has almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world. The horror show of mass violence will continue until there is gun control at the Federal level or gun restrictions are written into the Constitution. The latter is probably not possible. The Second Amendment to the Constitution in and of itself is probably enough to doom the US to the fate of a second class nation or worse. In the People's Republic of China, access by the general public to firearms is subject to some of the strictest control measures in the world. With the exception of individuals with hunting permits and some ethnic minorities, civilian firearm ownership is restricted to non-individual entities. China is surging ahead of the US economically and doesn't have to deal on a daily basis with the spectacle of mass violence committed by its citizens on other citizens. As Joe Biden said, mass murders are a national embarrassment.
The conclusion is that most of the world's nations are much more sensible about gun control. The US is the outlier, and it's turning the US into a police state not because police own all the weapons but because the citizens own so many of them and are using them on fellow citizens with increasing frequency. This is having a destabilizing effect on the whole citizenry because no one knows who may be next to suffer a random act of mass violence. Lenin once famously remarked that businessmen would happily sell for a profit the rope that would later be used to hang them. American businessmen who sell guns and ammunition are now happily selling American citizens the guns with which on a daily basis they are slaughtering each other senselessly and for no reason at all. The US is degenerating into a nation dragging itself down and destabilizing itself into a black hole that seemingly it can't recover from.
