Thursday, April 9, 2009

Three in the Grave-The Right To Bear Arms

The Second Amendment. The right to bear arms. Ok. I get it. The British, roving bears, dinner, your neighbor who lost his mind from the mind numbing isolation of seventeenth century America. The Indians. Cant' forget them. Anybody who even thinks of coming on our farm, our land, in our door. DO NOT TREAD ON ME OR I WILL BLOW YOU AWAY. Ain't no sheriff. Ain't no police. Just us in this vast Louisiana Purchase and I think I will go further west to where the Pacific rims the shore and you better believe I need guns and lots of them. The Spanish. Texans. Mexicans. You name it they were there and nobody was very friendly. Then a funny thing happened, in the year of our Lord 1900, they declared the frontier closed.
We had just about exterminated the Indians. Shot most of the bears. Banished the Mexicans, the British, the Spaniards. We gave Texas to the Texacans. Now there are cops. Sheriffs. GMEN. Towns and roads and rules and regulations and highways and planes and trucks and automobiles. Not only is the frontier closed but it is jammed with people now. Three hundred and fifty million by the last count. America has filled up.
Year of our Lord 2009. We consistently mow each other down. We do it with assault weapons, handguns, machine guns, pistols, Winchesters, glocks, AK47s and an occasional grenade launcher. I've shot just about every weapon under the son. Magnums really kick but you can't hit anything. The Colt 45 is a really cool pistol but again it is very hard to hit the target. The Winchester, very cool rifle. Accurate and short and very Wild West. AK47 is amazing the way it can puncture a 55 gallon drum. Shotguns are a blast to knock the limbs of trees off. Thirty eights and twenty twos. So to all of you NRA devotees I am not someone who doesn't know his way around guns. I go shooting with retired Chicago cops in the Boundary Waters and these guys are not just playing around. I use guns that have three in the grave, four in the grave, five in the grave. For all you Rambo wantabes that is real people gunned down by cops in Chicago. They killed lots of bad guys with these weapons. And they always say with some reverence, "be careful, I got three in the grave with that one"
But here's the thing. They need their guns. Again, I get it. They are cops. But as far as I know after that, we are out of enemies--except for each other. The Founding Fathers passed the second amendment because WE NEEDED IT. We did not want the British to come back and try and colonize us again. And it worked! But here's the deal, those days are OVER. Oh I need my gun to protect me against the government. Please. Your gun will do nothing if it comes to that. They will simply zap you with a drone in your fortified suburban home. You will never know what vaporized you as you sit clutching your assault weapon.
The fact is it's over. We live in the twenty first century and the only thing the second amendment is doing is allowing every psycho and his mother to mow down the last guy who cut him off in the parking lot. Or the guys who have watched way too much American television and figure it is better to go out in a hail of bodies then the ignominious death of obscurity. That's it. Hey, to you ranchers out in the hinterlands, I understand. But that is percent of the population. It is no longer about gun control, it is about doing what is good for the majority. You really don't want your neighbor who's not a cop, saying, " hey Bill, be careful with that one, I got three in the grave."

Books by William Hazelgrove