It’s time to deal with Trumputin’s Second Amendment idiocy

My beloved childhood friend, someone I’ve known since before elementary school, has lost his grandson in the latest Florida shooting.

He was a freshman in high school, a beautiful innocent, full of joy and promise. My sister cannot stop crying. Writing this article is the only way I can deal with it. I cannot yet bring myself to call.

Make no mistake about this: Sooner or later, these mass murders will strike you personally in your home and in your heart and in your soul.

You may see them as abstract ghosts, fleeting horror shows off in the distance. But there are so goddamn many of them, it is absolutely inevitable you will lose someone you love very soon. Close your eyes and ask who it will be, and what that will do to you and yours for the rest of your lives.

It will be a stone in your core that will never go away.

America’s gun holocaust has become a ghastly game of Russian Roulette and all of us are losing to the House, which is to say the gun industry.

The Manchurian Mafioso in the White House says it’s a mental health issue, and for once he’s absolutely right.

Trumputin and those like him are criminally insane when it comes to (among so many other things) guns. That the slumlord-in-chief has issued a statement blaming the victims, and without mentioning gun control, is par for his course.

The first thing to remember about gun violence is that it is A BUSINESS. There is an entire corporate infrastructure that makes BIG MONEY on these murders. Whoever makes and sells the automatic weapons and the bullets that do these slaughters makes a profit on them. Wednesday’s shooting, like tomorrow’s, puts money in their bank account. They will be enriched by the next mass slaughter and the one after that and the one after that.

They can haul out all the fake constitutional rhetoric they want. But the National Rifle Association is out there promoting an industry that is IN BUSINESS to threaten your health, safety, legal rights, and long-term security.

By law, nothing beyond their own corporate bottom line has the least impact on them.

Every limitation on gun ownership COSTS THEM CASH. And it’s no accident Trumputin’s Russian backers chose the NRA (among so many others) to launder money into his campaign.

That they have warped the Bill of Rights comes with the territory.

Here’s what the Second Amendment actually says:

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

No other of the first Ten Amendments has an explanatory introduction. The right to keep and bear arms is assumed as a basic right, but ONLY in light of service to the security of a free state, and under the auspices of a well-regulated militia.

In other words:

NOBODY HAS A LEGAL RIGHT TO OWN A GUN IN THIS COUNTRY UNLESS THEY CAN SHOW THAT THEIR OWNERSHIP OF SUCH A WEAPON SERVES THE SECURITY OF OUR FREE STATE,

and, SUCH OWNERSHIP MUST BE INTEGRATED INTO A WELL-REGULATED OFFICIAL ORGANIZATION.

So if you are a demonstrably sane person, and can show that your gun ownership will help protect our security, and you are a member of a sanctioned, well-regulated official organization with real social accountability, then the Second Amendment does indicate you have a legal right to own a gun.

Otherwise, FORGET IT. There is NO CONSTITUTIONAL REASON to believe you have the right to keep and bear arms.

There are historic roots to this amendment. The Founders were foisting a Constitution that imposed a strong central government on a nation that didn’t want one.

In an agrarian society, farmers who’d just fought a guerrilla war to defeat an imperial power wanted assurances their local militias would remain intact, and that their ownership of single-shot, hard-to-load muskets would be protected. These were groups of neighbors who knew and trusted each other and wanted mutual protection for their communities.

Slave owners like James Madison, who crafted the Bill of Rights, also wanted to protect the military units they relied on to track down runaways and stop a slave rebellion.

But the idea that a general populace, full of unbalanced crazy people, would be left at random to own huge arsenals with the killing power we’ve seen in Florida, Las Vegas, Connecticut and so many other places would have absolutely horrified every one of those who wrote the Constitution and then demanded a Bill of Rights.

This is not what they meant. They would’ve never stood for it.

The government they were establishing, for all its class, gender, racial biases, and other faults, was meant to secure “the general welfare.”

The Second Amendment is now being deliberately misinterpreted by a predatory industry, a corrupt corporate elite, and an uncaring, would-be dictator. They are protecting the bottom line of a for-profit industry with not a shred of conscience or concern for the security of a free state or the law.

So next time some gun lover throws the Second Amendment at you, throw it right back.

And when you read the horrible news about the inevitable next mass slaughter, remember that sooner or later it will be you or someone you love and it will forever ruin your life.

This does not happen in other industrial nations.

It’s long past time to remove the gun industry’s unlawful control over our government.

We have overcome before, and we will again, even on this. Our lives depend on it.

Harvey Wasserman’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Life & Death Spiral of US History will be published in the fall at Solartopia.org.