Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a peacenik who doesn’t believe that violence solves anything. For all the years of my life, I have always been against the possession of guns.
I look at little children finding their parents’ guns that should have been locked away, but were left unattended, and shooting one of their siblings or one of their parents. I look at people who have ungovernable tempers getting angry at co-workers, family members, teachers, employers, politicians, and going on a shooting rampage, and blaming the NRA for pushing the sale of guns so they can make a lot of money.
The homicides in this country provoked by people who reach for their gun instead of having a rational discussion to settle disputes, keeps escalating, and all I see is bloodshed as a way of life for countless angry people.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice, Warren Burger, wrote, “The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”
So, why am I now sitting on the fence about the ownership of guns, given how opposed to them I’ve always been?
Perhaps it’s because of a dream I had when we became embroiled in ISIS’s form of justice, i.e., beheadings, shootings, torture, etc., of people who didn’t share their religious beliefs.
In my dream, I started seeing how many people in this country were becoming radicals and demanding that we replace our system of justice with Sharia law. And then I started seeing waves of immigrants pouring into this country torturing, shooting and beheading our unarmed citizens who only wanted to live in peace.
When I woke up, I was distressed and visibly shaken. I could still see armed radicals breaking into homes and businesses with their guns and our own people not able to defend themselves.
If my dreams weren’t often prophetic, I would have looked for a symbolic meaning but this was so clear that I couldn’t dismiss it as something I needed to analyze.
So, here I sit, still sitting on the fence about the ownership of guns. If I could be guaranteed that background checks of criminals would be made and that parents who left their unattended guns out for their young children to find, would face jail sentences, I might be more willing to side with people who want to own guns.
But, so far, all I’ve seen is that anyone can buy a gun and there is no waiting period for tempers to cool off, making it more likely for people with ungovernable tempers to go on a shooting spree. And, so far, there are no penalties for parents who leave their guns in places where little children can find them and kill someone. And none of these concerns have anything to do with the mentally ill who are more likely to take their own lives than the lives of others.