Excuse Me. We Are Not in 1791.

To be clear: today is May 24, 2022. Not 1791. Earlier today, there was a massacre in Uvalde, Texas, at an elementary school called Robb. As I write this, one gunman has killed at least nineteen children and two adults. Words like sad and outraged feel insufficient, almost evasive. The world feels darker tonight than it did last night.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Earlier in the day, an email referencing George Floyd had me thinking about progress. Ten days ago, a massacre in Buffalo targeted Black Americans. Is this what we call progress? Two years ago, one white police officer killed one Black man. Today, a white young man targets Black lives in a mass shooting. Progress? If so, the word has lost all meaning.

I was already thinking about racism and the myth of progress when I learned about today’s massacre. It immediately brought me back to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where twenty-six people were killed—most of them children. That was 3,448 days ago. What have we done since then? What has changed?

Nothing.

How can a nation claim progress while clinging so fiercely to intentions drafted 231 years ago?

Yes, I am talking about the Second Amendment.

Adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it reads:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The intention behind this amendment was not ambiguous. It was written to protect citizens from federal overreach, to ensure balance of power in a young and fragile nation. I am confident the framers were not envisioning assault weapons in elementary schools. I am equally confident they were not imagining massacres targeting children or Black Americans as “necessary to the security of a free State.”

231 years ago was a profoundly different world. For heaven’s sake, the 13th Amendment—which abolished slavery—was not ratified until 1865. We are not living in the moral or political context of 1791. Pretending otherwise is not fidelity to history; it is cowardice disguised as tradition.

We are not in 1791.
It is time to evolve.
It is time to admit that gun control is not an erosion of freedom, but a requirement for it.

A free State cannot be secured by sacrificing children. Lives must matter more than guns.

_____

Retrieve from the archive to read: It Is Okay to Be Not Okay

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