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By Faouzi Talby
Morocco World News
Las Vegas, Nevada, July 23, 2012
Though four United States Presidents fell victim to an assassin’s bullet, no change has been made in regards to the ownership of handguns by private citizens, due to the irreversible second amendment: the constitutional right to own a handgun.
The last U.S. president that lost his life in office was John F. Kennedy while riding in his motorcade in November 1963; but assassination attempts on the lives of politicians have not ended in Dallas, Texas. In June 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of President Kennedy was slain shortly after a presidential campaign speech in Los Angeles, California. Two months earlier, in April 1968, civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. In February 1965, Malcolm X, aka Hajj Malik Shabbazz, a Muslim human rights activist, was gunned down during a speech in front of a large audience in New York City. To make a long list short, in 2011, U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a deranged gunman at a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona while chatting with constituents. She survived, but is left disabled for life.
According to statistics, more people have lost their lives to handguns in the U.S. than all American soldiers killed in the Korean, Vietnam, Golf, Iraq, Afghanistan, Civil and Revolutionary wars combined. Despite several attempts by Congress to curb the ownership of certain weapons such as assault rifles and semi-automatics, the unrelenting National Rifle Association’s, or NRA, powerful lobbyists manage to kill every congressional bill designed to limit the sale of handguns and making thorough F.B.I. background checks. The gun lobby argument is analogous to drivers are the killers, not cars. Same goes for guns, the killer is the one who pulls the trigger.
Early in July 2012, several pre-teen children were targets in Chicago, Illinois of gang wars, which brought the city to a standstill for two weeks. Within the same month, a lone wolf graduate student in Aurora, Colorado opened fire on an unsuspecting crowd of moviegoers in the dark, killing 12 and injuring 79 people – 11 critically – a thing that was supposed to happen in the movies, not at the movies. In August 1966, another student, the University of Texas Clock Tower sniper, killed 14 and injured 32. In April 1999, two high school students went on a shooting rampage at their high school in Columbine, Colorado killing 12 fellow students, one teacher and injuring 21 others. Lastly, in April 2007, a graduate student at Virginia Tech killed 32 and wounded 17 students, only weeks away from receiving their PhDs.
There are about 300 million guns in American households, almost one gun per citizen. If a toddler happens to play with a loaded firearm and gets shot accidentally or killed, the parent would be charged with second degree murder, a sentence of 7 years in prison, for not putting a safety on the gun. The sale of toy guns that resemble real ones has been banned after incidents of kids pointing them at cops, and getting blown away mistakenly by law officers. This brings to mind suicide by cops, a person who wishes to commit suicide, points a fake gun at police officers so the latter shoots and kills them.
Another major gun issue is stolen guns and untraceable illegal guns, with erased serial numbers, which render cold murder cases forever unsolved.
If anything is expected to be done politically to curb the sale of 100 guns per minute in the U.S., it’s a long shot. The Founding Fathers of the country (Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Hancock), strongly defended the ownership of guns and the arming of militias in the American constitution to prevent the government from becoming dictatorial. For more than two centuries, no American politician has had any luck curbing the sale of firearms, let alone undoing the second amendment in the Bill of Rights, one of the 10 pillars of the American constitution.
To safeguard citizens against tyranny and to ensure that the government remains a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the authors of the constitution granted private citizens the right to own guns to be able to overthrow their undemocratic government. By the same token, if any foreign army invades the United States, it would be impossible for them to control the population, if every citizen owns a gun.
Faouzi Talby is Political science student at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He is a contributor to Morocco World News.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
