January was a busy month. Tunisia and Egypt challenged their autocratic governments; the Chinese President Hu Jintao paid a visit to the White House; and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, from Arizona's Eighth Congressional District, was the target of an assassination attempt by Jared Lee Loughner, a mentally unsound twenty-two year old with dubious political affiliations and motivations and one of the most terrifying mug shots in recent memory.
The violence at a suburban Safeway near Tucson, Arizona, became a rallying point for pundits on the both the left and the right.
Sarah Palin was resoundingly criticized for her infamous cross-hairs map, in which members of Congress who voted for the 2010 health care bill were visually (and disturbingly) targeted, and supporters were encouraged to "reload" instead of retreating.
Some conservative commentators asserted that everyone at the Congress on Your Corner event on January 8, 2011 would have been safer if the majority of attendees had been carrying weapons.
The logic of that last point escapes me; the most rational step would seem to be more rigorous background checks on those applying for a license to purchase and carry firearms and a prohibition on weapons with extended magazines, whose sole purpose appears to be the efficient slaughter of human beings.
At this point, it has become ridiculous to argue that guns do not kill people or that the widespread ownership of firearms ensures the safety of the populace at large. Pro-gun lobbyists invoke the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms with every other breath, but since when are the rights guaranteed by the Constitution limitless? Freedom of speech, for example, extends only until threats are made or violence incited.
I am not a constitutional scholar, but I'm certainly not alone in acknowledging that our country and its guiding document were founded—well over 200 years ago—upon the notion that the country would change, and the government would need to adapt.
The Bill of Rights does not mention guns with extended magazines because they did not exist when it was written; soldiers in the Revolutionary War had fought valiantly with single-shot muskets, and the invention of a weapon that could fire 20-plus rounds without reloading was surely unfathomable.
The Second Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights because of the young country's relationship with the tyrannical British government and its extremely recent experience of a war fought on its own soil.
More recently, in 2008, the Supreme Court protected the right of the individual to own a firearm for the purpose of self-defense and argued that the right to bear arms was not solely connected to service in a militia.
I'm in no way suggesting that firearms ought to be illegal, across the board; I'm arguing that under no circumstances should our reverence for the Constitution as a sacred document interfere with the obligation to protect our citizens from violent attack.
Maybe it's crazy, but I think the lives of our elected officials and our citizens—including that of a nine-year-old girl—ought to be more important than, for example, the theoretical and distant possibility that one might have to take up arms against the marauding federal government.
It is a national tragedy when a massacre such as this occurs, and any discussion of gun control is lost amid finger-pointing and the blame game.
A man whose struggles with mental illness were well documented was able to procure a firearm and walk into a Walmart to buy bullets.
Seriously, what is the harm in more strenuous background checks for those attempting to purchase a lethal weapon?
For a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl, four slain community members and Congressional employees and 14 critically wounded bystanders, our system failed more than miserably. Something needs to change.