LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

"Lawyers, Guns and Money" is a rock & roll song by the late Warren Zevon. The song describes a situation gotten into by a serial binger and party animal that pretty much got out of hand, even by madman standards. Great song. Lawyers, guns and money, however, can also be used to describe the root causes of many of America's problems. Lawyers? Well, at the risk of taking potshots at an easy target, we've always had too many of them, and they seem to be busier than ever now defending people who abuse the latter two; guns and money. Guns? The geniuses who wrote the Bill of Rights were pretty darned specific in writing those Constitutional amendments in every case but one. That would be the Second Amendment, concerning the right to keep and bear arms. There's lots of wiggle room there.

One of the briefest amendments, it reads in full: "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 odd placement of the commas is the original punctuation, the final of several drafts.) And that's it. No details on whether or not every Tom, Dick and Harriet can legally walk around towing a howitzer in a shopping cart or wearing criss-cossing bandoliers of bullets as a fashion accessory. And that bit about "well-regulated" and "Militia?" Were the people in the militia the only ones who get to keep and bear arms? Seems like anyone's guess. What about "free State" and "the people?" Would that be the nation as a whole or each individual state of the Union? And would the people be individuals or the public as a separate entity represented by their militia? There's a few more thing left to the imagination, an odd thing to do when writing a constitution, especially for a nation whose imagination knows no bounds.

After all, the founding of a society such as The United States of America at the time when it was founded was a grand exercise in unbridled imagination. To the vast majority of the world at that time, including a substantial portion of the people living in the English Colonies, tossing off the yoke of kings and emperors and having the people themselves running the show was a complete fantasy, an outrageous assault on the accepted world order. Who else but a bunch of dreamers would have included the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in a list of inalienable rights? Nobody was supposed to be happy except for royalty back then! The fact that their revolution succeeded only fueled American dreams and aspirations to unprecedented heights, and a nation that was an inspiration to the entire world was founded.

LIving up to the ideas and ideals of our Founding Fathers was to become a journey of learning and achievement that we are still pursuing. America has always been as much of an idea as a nation, a quest for perfection in government, individual opportunity, freedom and civil rights. Earth-shaking document that it was, the Constitution was made by humans, and thus imperfect. Hence the amendments. Even in the main draft, slaves, indentured servants and Native Americans were not counted as entire human beings in the census that determined representation in Congress. They were considered three fifths of a human being, a situation that had to be corrected by a bloody and destructive civil as that tested the notion of self government as never before (see Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address).

So perhaps the Second Amendment can be revisited. When you get some yahoo showing up outside a presidential speech in Phoenix carrying his rifle "because I'm in Arizona and still have some rights" and 5 people being shot in Brooklyn on one block in the space of a few hours in separate and unrelated incidents, maybe there is something to the old argument that there are too many loose guns in the hands of too many morons floating around in America. While every state has already amended (or expanded) the Second Amendment to suit themselves, there is no national consensus in a nation that scrupulously regulates drivers, dog owners, parking rules, water consumption, litter recycling and alcohol sales. Is there no middle ground between a completely unarmed populace and drive-by shooting by teenage gangsters?

After all, if people are concerned that taking guns away from people will make it harder to commit stickups and armed robberies, time honored American traditions, let's examine the third part of Lawyers, Guns and Money. Recent events have clearly proven that stealing money is an increasingly non-violent crime. As a matter of fact, it is a crime that has been taken over from the poverty-stricken classes by the ultra-wealthy, making even the largest of gun-driven bank robberies and jewel heists seem like petty larceny in comparison to their spectacular multi-billion dollar hauls. And yet, just like guns, Americans seem reluctant to implement regulations on the insider manipulation of the nation's money supply. And just like guns, the money (or rather, the glaring lack of it) is causing untold misery for ordinary Americans every day of every week of every year.

And so the lawyers rake in hefty fees on all sides of the arguments surrounding guns and money. The National Rifle Association, the vast majority of whose members are completely responsible gun owners, maintains one of the most effective lobbying organizations in Washington and employs brigades of expensive attorneys to challenge any anti-gun legislation anywhere in the nation. What they are essentially doing is telling the nation that their own dues-paying, law abiding membership is wrong and that it's the right of every American to be an irresponsible gun owner, the consequences of crime and death and shooting sprees by high school students and madmen be damned. Sort of puts a crimp in that whole "pursuit of happiness" deal when you have to be in pursuit of cover on a regular basis when bullets start flying.

Like crime in general, the damage of too many loose guns and too much money being stolen by the uber-wealthy falls heaviest of the poor. The United States' response to this? Locking up 2.2 million people in prison, 700,000 more than China with her 1.3 billion people. And the majority of our inmates are drawn from ranks of our poverty stricken minorities, the raw material for the prison industry. Which means there's no shortage of lucrative work for our lawyers involved in the booming growth industry that is America's prison system. Is it cheaper to maintain the world's largest prison system or to clamp down on all the loose firearms floating around society?

We also outlaw every drug but the most destructive of them all, alcohol, and in this way ensure that our prisons will continue to thrive by locking up not only the violent dealers of drugs but also their customers. The money invested in maintaining this policy is incalculable, and the guns required to sustain both the huge criminal drug cartels and the street dealers are in the many hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. Imagine locking up the CEOs of Budweiser and Jack Daniels and all the liquor store clerks and their customers? We'd have to set aside an area the size of Alaska to hold them all, and hire several large armies to guard them. Well, you don't have to imagine such folly since they are part of a legal, respectable, well-regulated and heavily taxed industry, in spite of the fact that they are dealers of the most deadly intoxicant known to man.

But there is no mention of drugs or alcohol in The Constitution. Perhaps like the ambiguous wording of the Second Amendment, the Declaration of Independence counted on "the pursuit of happiness" to cover the use of intoxicants by consenting adults? There is certainly nothing banning them in either document. The notion of regulating human pleasures only evolved late in the game, outlawing prostitution, gambling, drugs and even for a dozen foolish years, alcohol. Well, it's later still in the game and perhaps it's time to switch tactics: repeal all laws against victimless crimes and start strictly regulating firearms.

If the argument is that people will seek out firearms in spite of their illegality just as they do with drugs or prostitutes, then there is no argument for maintaining the legality of the one and not the other. The idea is not to ban guns, but make them difficult to obtain and subject to strict regulation, just like alcohol and tobacco. Hand guns are not toys or fashion accessories and when carried on a regular basis tend to be used sooner or later to settle arguments and grudges and even to express petty concerns like road rage. And when you combine alcohol with guns, as is so often the case, guns win very time and innocent people get maimed and die. Let's reexamine that all-too-brief Second Amendment and our antiquated and puritanical vice laws. Let "Lawyers, Guns and Money" remain a great rock & roll song and not a way of life.