The Second Amendment vs. the Fifth Commandment: Which is more important?

The Second Amendment vs. the Fifth Commandment: Which is more important?

The nation again mourns the loss of young, innocent lives because some punk with a gun decided it would be a good idea to put them in the ground.

I have been a defender of the Second Amendment. I believed it was the right of an individual to possess a weapon for ethical hunting, for self-defense, and for limited sport that does not involve putting a living, breathing thing in its crosshairs.

Not now.

The time has come for us to take a deep breath, find our spine, and abolish the Second Amendment. The deaths keep mounting without reprieve, and the only way to curb them is to eliminate the weapons that cause them.

I am a former gun owner. I have owned several handguns, two hunting rifles, a shotgun. I am ashamed to admit that I was even a member of the NRA for a short time until the organization was radicalized into the cult-like clan it is today.

I would like to think that I used my weapons responsibly and was correct in supporting a group that at the time encouraged safety and training courses instead of propagandizing and pouring fortunes into political campaigns.

I understand how challenging it can be to learn how to shoot competitively and to take to the field for wild game and how somebody could be lulled into a false sense of security by simply having a weapon at the ready.

But I also understand the challenge of dealing with the loss of family members who have been killed by weapons.

I have two in my family who were gunned down: a cousin shot and killed while on duty as a police officer in St. Louis and a grandfather who was shot in the back by a whack job who refused to pay his rent. Both shooters were found guilty and remain incarcerated. I couldn’t justify the eye-for-an-eye mentality because it wouldn’t bring back either my cousin or my grandfather, and capital punishment would serve no other purpose than extinguishing two more lives.

Most importantly, I weighed a very serious question: What’s more important, the Second Amendment or the Fifth Commandment?

I then came to the conclusion, which  stand by it today, that you can’t have it both ways.

And my sense of morality props me up to believe that “Thou shalt not kill” is infinitely more important to our humanity than 27 poorly written words that have been misinterpreted and misrepresented to create one of the widest political chasms in America today.

Proponents of the Second Amendment will bellow from the stump how they need their guns for self-defense, to put food on their tables, and to put down the government should it get out of hand.

Neither is acceptable anymore, not when the Second Amendment stands as the gateway to mass killings.

Take emotion out of the equation.

You’ll find that good guys with a gun don’t make a dent in stopping the bad guys.

You’ll find that the cost of weapons, ammunition, and other accoutrements of hunting do not make it a frugal way of putting food on the table. And I defy you to come up with the moral authority to tell me that it is perfectly acceptable to kill an animal with only one reason: to put its skull or hide on your wall.

You’ll find, if you use reason instead of emotion, that any so-called militia that could be raised among recalcitrants would stand no chance against the most powerful military in the world.

The call has gone out to restrict or place an outright ban on assault weapons.

It’s a good start, but the punk who took out those kids in California last week was using a garden-variety .45 caliber handgun.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to endure the echo of hollow words offering “thoughts and prayers” for the victims and their families. That’s an insulting diversionary tactic to distract from the problem at hand. We are hearing the fallacious talk, of course, about mental illness and its link to mass shootings. No link has ever found root in this claim.

These are evil acts undertaken by evil people.

Don’t blame parents. As we all know, good parents have bad kids.

Don’t blame society. Society produces fine, moral, compassionate people as well as these monsters.

Don’t blame anything but the uncontrolled anger and evil found in the hearts of many who take it to the ultimate, grisly extreme.

Blame it on the easy access these people have to guns.

Look at our streets. Look at how our local police departments have had to gear up to military grade weapons to try to keep the peace.

Then look back to history when the cop on the beat carried a billy club and a sidearm most never drew in anger.

A lot has taken place between those eras.

Unbelievably, gun manufacturers are protected from most lawsuits when their weapons are used in killings and have gotten smarter about how they market their deadly wares, a fact not lost on the current conservative Supreme Court of the United States.

SCOTUS recently ruled that a lawsuit brought by a victim and family members of those lost during one of our tragic massacres, in which a lone gunman used a Remington Bushmaster AR-15 to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary school on Dec. 14, 2012, can go forward.

The court found that the lawsuit claims that Remington should not have made such a dangerous weapon available to the public and that the company allegedly targeted younger, at-risk males in marketing and product placement in violent video games were legitimate reasons to proceed with the case.

This was a startling decision, to say the least, with such a conservative-heavy court, which also noted that it could be a “Herculean task” for the families to prove.

I’m curious if Remington will seek a settlement rather than risk having some of its marketing ploys outed. A settlement could open the door for other claims. A full-blown trial, on the other hand, could expose some internal strategies that would prove damaging to Remington; plus, the possibility exists that the company could lose.

Only time will tell how it all pays out.

Meanwhile, we must get to the very essence of this.

What is more important, the Second Amendment or the Fifth Commandment?

I think the answer is clear.

Peace.

The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.

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