Still too easy to buy guns

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Still too easy to buy guns				April 27, 2005

It seems that Adam McCool and Jason Long have gone missing. Forever.

Both young residents of William & Mary’s Unit G recently decided, for whatever reason, that the time had come to cash in their chips, and, with shotguns to their heads, pull the suicidal trigger.

Nothing is gained by an irrational condemnation of McCool or Long for their ultimate decision. Nor will we ever know what went through their obviously troubled minds before they decided to end their young lives. For all we know, they, like some Sartrean anti-hero, may have reached existential conclusions about the futility and hypocrisy of life and acted accordingly. As Sartre points out, “one is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.”

Deeply disturbing though it is, suicide per se is not the primary issue of concern here. What is troubling is the fact that these two youths were so easily able to shop for weapons of self-destruction at two Wal-Mart stores, one in York County and one in Newport News. Unfortunately, Kmart too stocks rifles, though Target, much to its credit, refuses to sell any gun-related products.

The point is that shotguns are readily available locally. After a quick background check, anyone over the age of 18 can purchase a long gun and, without any training or supervision, walk out of the store and start blasting away.

This, I suspect, is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when, in 1789, they agreed to the following proposal by James Madison to amend the Constitution: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Nor was it what the Virginia legislature had in mind when, in 1776, it approved the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which may well have served as the model for Madison’s amendment.

In both cases, the emphasis is on the need for well-regulated militias, and in the Virginia Declaration of Rights it is a “well-trained militia” and people who are “trained to arms.”

What seems to be missing in most interpretive discussions of the Second Amendment is the fact that Madison, Mason, Jefferson and most other Founding Fathers were serious students of Latin and that their formal syntax frequently reflected the Ciceronian nuances of that language.

Hence, the clause “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the state” is what would grammatically be called an absolute clause in Latin. The function of such a clause is to indicate, among other things, the cause or reason why the main clause is valid. Thus, the people have a right to bear arms because (and only because) we need a well-regulated militia.

Similarly, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the right to bear arms is validated by the fact that a well-trained militia is the “proper, natural and safe defense of a free state.”

Most states have done away with militias in favor of the National Guard and local police forces. In Virginia, however, there are, in addition to the National Guard, a Virginia Defense Force, a naval militia and the so-called “unregulated militia,” which consists of all citizens between the ages of 16 and 55. This militia may be called up anytime by the governor to be trained before going into service. Theoretically, then, all Virginia citizens between the ages of 16 and 55 have a right to bear arms as potential members of a well-trained militia. Those younger than 16 or older than 55 do not, since they can be part of no militia.

Contrary to popular opinion, neither the National Rifle Association nor private citizen armies constitute an official militia in Virginia or anywhere else.

So far have we come from the original intent of the Founding Fathers that the all-important causal clause dealing with militias in the Second Amendment has been reduced to unreadable small print by myopic state legislatures. This leaves us only with the destructive notion that just about anyone has a right to carry handguns or shotguns anywhere for the alleged sake of self defense, hunting, and other sportive purposes. Sadly, we might add homicide and suicide to the list as well.

Gone too is the necessity for being well-trained in the use of shotguns or the idea that one has a right to bear arms primarily for the defense of the people of a state or nation.

So it was that two young men could go to Wal-Mart, purchase long guns and, without any training in their use or questions about their purpose, walk out of the store, fully armed and potentially dangerous not only to themselves but to anyone else whom an inexperienced rifleman might victimize.

While there is little hope that the currently absurd trend of gun proliferation will not continue unabated, we might best celebrate the short lives of Adam McCool and Jason Long by taking a few minutes to cogitate on the unreasonable ease with which they could purchase the weapons they would use to end their lives.