The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the carnage wrought by the Second Amendment, and it is our duty to "amend" that mistake

Donald Trump is so obsessed with his own self-aggrandizement that he believes that it is those fanatics who attend his campaign rallies who are the ones who write the history books. There is a reason why they are the “forgotten” people who are only taken seriously insofar as how much damage they cause to civil discourse. The white Arkansas woman who held four black high school football players—who were selling discount cards door-to-door to raise funds for the school athletic department—at gunpoint, and the racist white man who drove his black pick-up truck right into the bicycle lane inches from where I was standing waiting for a bus, honking his horn at the “Mexican” (a clearly deliberate act because he shortly thereafter drifted into the left turn lane), are  typical of the kind of people who are the real formulators of “policy” in the Trump administration.  These are the people best ignored and left forgotten, but Trump won’t let us, because those are the only people he listens to.

And so it was no “surprise” that Trump backed off his suggestion of stronger background checks for gun purchases after just one call from one of those far-right fanatics, the NRA’s chief propagandist and nut-job, Wayne LaPierre. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of Americans want some kind of gun control legislation after another weekly massacre; inflaming the paranoia of gun fanatics is enough to ditch anything resembling common sense. Gun control is not a “new” thing; it was discussed during the height of the crime sprees during the 1930s when the likes of Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and other criminals out-gunned law enforcement. It was an issue during the 60s; on The Smothers Brothers show, Pat Paulsen did one of his “public service” editorials in which he “advocated” for gun rights, deadpanning that “If you are old enough to get arrested, you are old enough to own a gun,” before he accidentally “shot” one of the television crew. Laugh-In's inaugural "Fickle Finger of Fate" award was given to the U.S. Congress, for "ignoring the wishes of 200 million Americans" and refusing to pass gun control legislation.

There are those who decry anti-gun sentiment as a “phenomenon” that didn’t appear until the 20^th century. Perhaps the reason for this, as already suggested, is that the firepower of privately-owned weapons increased dramatically both in efficacy and lethality. Why don’t gun fanatics ever stop to think that if the “founding fathers” had a crystal ball and could see all the  carnage that the Second Amendment has allowed, and that none of it is has anything to do with preserving democratic principles or battling “tyranny,” that they would have had at the very least second thoughts about the vague wording of the amendment that has allowed fanatics to define it by the widest possible “interpretation”? 

Maybe what we need is an amendment “amending” the Second Amendment. It is not “unprecedented,” after all; the Prohibition amendment—which was the cause of so much violence among bootleggers and gangsters—was eventually repealed. The Second Amendment was passed at a time when guns were slow to load, inaccurate and still used to hunt game for sustenance. No “founding father” was alive to witness the carnage of the Civil War, nor could they have imagined one gunman killing 50 or more people in a matter of minutes. If they could see what we see today, who could doubt that they would have changed the amendment to reflect a reality that they could not have possibly imagined? Since they could not foresee it, it is our duty to amend their mistake.