The problem is that a person with mental illness was able to acquire an ARSENAL!!!
LOL
Guns don't kill people, people WITH GUNS kill people
REGULATE!
It's sad that liberals always scream at right-wingers (I won't say "conservatives", because they aren't) for hating the Constitution, right up until they show that they have their own parts they hate. When those hates overlap, we lose liberty.
There is no constitutional authority to regulate firearms. Under the meaning of "infringe", even a law distinguishing between types of firearms is suspect. The ridiculous aspect is that Congress has plenty of authority to do things which actually would address the issues, and no one, right or left, is addressing it!
Article I, Section 8, grants Congress authority:
"
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia...."
LaPierre and his fellow gun rights organization leaders delight in reminding us that we are all the militia when it serves to uphold an argument for the liberties they want to enjoy, but they seem to shy away from any suggestion that as the militia they should have any kind of organization or discipline imposed on them (quite in line with the common American attitude that the law is for making other people do what we think they should, but never bother
us).
The point of "organizing, arming, and disciplining" is to encourage the militia to be well-regulated in the Second Amendment meaning of the term. A disorganized militia is of little use for defending a free state, and an undisciplined one is of little use at all. With respect to mass shootings, every single one shows just how unorganized and undisciplined we, the militia are, starting with people leaving guns about unsecured so animals bent on killing fellow-citizens can just walk away with them.
Start with that one: a militia that doesn't secure its weapons is undisciplined. For the discipline of the militia, safe storage of all weapons not in use could quite easily be required. One or two guns in a household hidden for use in defending the home might be unsecured, that availability constituting a "use", but half a dozen or more? Unless there are that many residents, such an unsecured array of weapons is undisciplined. Certainly, secure storage alone wouldn't have stopped many or any of the mass shootings of the last couple of decades, but it might well have mitigated them.
Further, allowing someone clearly incompetent with weapons (in the old meaning, which included mental/emotional competence), is not a sign of an disciplined militia. While in a nation of laws the burden is on the state to show that a citizen is not to be considered competent, in almost every case the people around these mass shooters have known beforehand that they were not really to be trusted around destructive materials of any kind, even if just ammonia and bleach in the same room. How to keep such incompetent people from having weapons? In colonial days that wasn't difficult; neighbors knew each other and communities understood who just shouldn't have guns (one reason, BTW, that Thomas Jefferson thought there should be no towns larger than a few thousand people), and the local militia captain or other officer generally knew who those were. But today, we not only lack that sort of community for the most part, we don't even have the militia officers who could enforce the prohibition!
And that leads to organization: we have a thoroughly disorganized militia. It isn't merely unorganized, because most of the people -- including many gun owners -- lack the requisite attitude for being organized; it isn't a thought that they as gun owners have entertained! But Congress is authorized to remedy this, and in the spirit of the times when that authorization was written and ratified Congress was expected to act on that authority. Congress has not done so for generations.
We could do worse than to not merely authorize, but require, the establishment of officers for the unorganized militia, which is all of us. Sadly, the people most likely to be eager to serve as such would not be qualified, as they are more interested in their own privileges than in the responsibility inherent in taking up arms. As General George Patton noted, bearing arms is a great responsibility, and it is so even if you do not do so as an part of any organized militia, which in the United States at present is the National Guard. As I said when I spoke as a representative of the Pink Pistols to a chapter of PFLAG, to bear arms, even on a daily basis, is to take responsibility for the peace and security of your community, not merely by behaving responsibly with your own weapon, but by standing ready to protect others should violence strike. As most everyone agrees, such protective action requires some training, and under the militia model behind the Constitution, the place for that training is in one's local militia, and the local militia needs officers -- not just any officers, but officers who understand that with rights come responsibility.
How do we get back to that grasp that rights and responsibilities are a package deal? We've lost it not just for guns, but for a great deal; if it were truly understood, the media would not be engaged in making every mass shooter a famous name and face, since that is a piece of the goals of every one. No, the media should only give pictures of these animals from the back, face down in their own blood once a good guy with a gun -- law enforcement or responsible citizen -- has stopped the threat and enacted justice in the only way a death penalty is morally legitimate: in defense of the innocent. Let them be nameless, faceless corpses; that would be the responsibility side of the right of a free press, that anyone else thinking of carrying out such action would see themselves as dead, unrecognized, leaving no mark behind but their own blood easily mopped from the floor (that would be another good image in the press: the blood wiped away as though the person had never been).
I don't know how we get back there, but it's the proper place to start. Much of the gun-owning population would be happy to engage in trying, and I should hope that most of the rest would be more than happy to see them do so.
Oh, and those officers of the local militias? They should be hooked into the mental health system we need just for its own sake: then they could recognize ahead of time who needed a little more attention... and who needed more than a little restriction.
Discipline. Organization. Congress, where are you?
