Shot at Sunday Services & the Second Amendment

26 people. A 5-year old boy. A 14 year old daughter of a preacher man. A person born the same year the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, 72 years old. Shot to death while attending Sunday services.

2017 Year-to-date: 532 people have died in mass shootings on American soil, 1,625 injured. These numbers will be higher by December 31st. This is our country.

I deeply respect our Constitution’s framework. The Bill of Rights is brilliant. I am particularly moved by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eight Amendments (among others later ratified). All of these constitutional rights have limitations born of legislation and seminal Supreme Court cases. It is long past time that the Second Amendment “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” be fucking infringed. A 5 year old shot to death at church is not a partisan issue — it is an American issue.

As the battle cry for the right to bear arms wages on, let us not forget the Second Amendment was born alongside Article 1 that counted black people as three-fifths of a whole person. The right to bear arms, carved out for the purpose of a “well regulated militia,” was drafted into the same Constitution that did not give me the right to vote. And the very same Constitution that put the last two republican presidents in the white house without a majority vote.

Sometimes it is damn time to change shit.

I do not take it lightly to advocate for infringement of constitutional rights. Today a 5 year old was shot to death in church. Tonight two parents mourn the unspeakable. It is damn time to change shit.

“If fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.”
– President Josiah Bartlet, The West Wing