Renaming the dog?

My ninth grade English teacher told me everything I write should have a thesis statement, a point.  But he also didn't know what a preposition was, and he certianly had no compunction about ending a sentence with one, so I'm temporarily disregarding his probably sound advice.  This serves as fair warning: this post really doesn't have a point, per se.  It's more of a musing and a venting of frustration.  Not your thing?  Come back in a few days, we'll post a recounting of our adventures to a real live gingerbread village.

On Wednesday of last week, I discovered through the outrage of the law blogs I read, that Judge Posner, writing on behalf of a three-judge panel, had issued a harsh strike down of one of the most stringent gun control laws in the country.  Prior to this opinion, Illinois banned the carrying of  loaded, accessible firearms anywhere outside the home.  it's been proven time and again a really effective law.  Shockingly, it's hard to kill someone with an unloaded weapon.  Or, ::gasp:: no weapon at all.

But Posner, namesake of the cutest dog in the world, decided to send his impeccable brain on vacay!  (For your consideration, a comparison of the dog and the man.)  And instead issued a flippant dismissal of the law.  A dismissal of the law that governs the actions of criminals in Chicago, the city by whom the entire country gauges the intesnity of the summer by following its murder rate.  Newsflash, those deaths aren't the result of random stranglings or ricin poisoning.

We all say things we regret; we can sometimes never anticipate how poorly we may have timed something.  And part of me wants to let a man I've respected for years off the hook.  After all, this is the conservative, Chicago school scholar that came out before the election and said he couldn't support a party of dingbats.  Paraphrasing, of course. (Actual words: "I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.")

But, even if Friday, the terrible events at Sandy Hook, had never happened, was this opinion really appropriate or well-reasoned?  Less than a week after a shooting in Portland?  Fewer than six months after Aurora?  Or, as Mother Jones tells us, in the wake of 62, YES SIXTY-TWO, mass-shootings in thirty years.

To be exact, these were just a few of Judge Posner's choice, and inappropriately flippant words:

"To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense described in Heller and McDonald. It is not a property right -- a right to kill a houseguest who, in a fit of aesthetic fury, tries to slash your copy of Norman Rockwell's painting, Santa with Elves.....One doesn’t have to be a historian to realize that a right to keep and bear arms for personal self-defense in the 18th century could not rationally have been limited to the home."

This is a totally selective and self-serving interpretation of the Second Amendment, with which there are myriad problems.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to go through all of them, but that to pretend the views of gentlemen in the 1700s who were accustomed to LOADING MUSKETS at a rate of one wildly imprecise missle per 1.5 minute were in any way able to portend the fire power of today is ludicrous.  As another of my favorite bloggers writes, it's like imagining the forefathers would protect the right to "carry around loaded hand cannons that pack the lethality of half of the Continental Army."It's wholly selective.  And it's the kind of Scalia originalism Posner proclaims himself to hate.

But it's also based on a choice reading of the Second Amendment, which promises the right to bear arms for the benefit of a "well-regulated militia."  And today's world is anything but well regulated as the victims of said 62 shootings would tell you, you know, if they were still alive to advocate.  But thank God, Posner is around to flippantly protect the oh-so-meek gun lobby.  As Gail Collins writes: "This is all about guns — access to guns and the ever-increasing firepower of guns. Over the past few years we’ve seen one shooting after another in which the killer was wielding weapons holding 30, 50, 100 bullets. I’m tired of hearing fellow citizens argue that you need that kind of firepower because it’s a pain to reload when you’re shooting clay pigeons. Or that the founding fathers specifically wanted to make sure Americans retained their right to carry rifles capable of mowing down dozens of people in a couple of minutes. "

I grew up in Texas.  I had a wonderful sheltered childhood, and I didn't really care about gun control.  But I don't even have a child, and I sobbed on the way home Friday night listening to the NPR coverage.  I spent Saturday with a good friend and her eight-month old baby, and she's petrified to leave her.  Ever.  The idea of dropping her child off at school petrifies her, and that's not right.  We can no longer pretend that guns don't kill people, that we don't need the regulation so clearly mentioned in the Second Amendment.

Judge Posner's decision will surely be reviewed en banc by the Seventh Circuit, but regardless it's headed to the Supreme Court.  And these most recent twenty-seven deaths MUST convince them to do the right thing.  But what I truly fear is that it won't.  And that breaks my heart.  How do we change this in the face of such callousness?