Giving The Constitution a brisk makeover, the Supreme Court recently intensified political and cultural warfare over gun control and abortion. A newly pregnant woman suddenly has to make a critical selection from a dramatically reduced set of options; and disappointment bedevils anyone who still won’t concede that in America common folks may carry guns.
Gun control as a laughing and crying matter
Are you thankful that there were no pistol-packing moms and dads in that Uvalde schoolhouse corridor when platoons of armed police did nothing – nothing! – as children were being killed slowly, shot by shot, just a few feet away?
There was only one shooter trapped with no way to escape. There were adorable hostage children lively and eager for a rescue. There were hungry media, anxious parents, and plenty of police with Constitutionally and Statutorily legal guns — and the cops had probably been warned against using excessive force in the daylight. But there was a flaw in the staging of the episode.
Gun control policies — put in place long after The Constitution was written — ensured that the police would be the only rescuers involved who had guns, but those policies did not require the police to do anything at all.
So those dozens of police all did what they were allowed to do: exactly nothing. The police listened while the children died.
Instead of a glorious rescue the crime scene eventually appeared to be a crowd of heavily armed policemen protecting one loony guy with a gun from citizen interference with his crude mass murder plan.
If it has a stomach, The Constitution probably has not yet finished throwing up.