“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.”

Now, as someone who honestly believes that the majority of people are disagreeable louts whom I would not want to willingly trust with unsheathed bread knives, much less sidearms or rifles, I personally find that particular amendment rather objectionable. Drunken idiots get into shoving matches and fist fights over sporting events or fender benders all the time. If everyone were allowed to pack shootin’ irons without legal let or hindrance, those shoving matches and fist fights would quickly turn into sidewalk shoot outs with hot lead flying everywhere, some of it, perhaps, into me, assuming I didn’t manage to get my own portly, generally slow moving ass down behind a hedge or nearby piece of ceramic statuary quickly enough to avoid such.

As a general rule, I prefer not to entrust the power of life and death to the hands of my frequently inebriated and often short tempered fellow citizens, and would much prefer to live in a world where magic bang sticks simply did not exist, or, like Amber, where the laws of physics did not allow them to function.

However, unlike many of my fellow liberals, I refuse to attempt to contort all semantic logic in order to find a loophole in the clear intentions of the Founding Fathers. Many of my comrades of the left wing point to the opening phrase of the Second Amendment, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”, and say, “well, there you go; John Quincy Adams only intended the National Guard to be able to keep rifles and pistols in their closets, not four guys named Jethro in a Chevy pick up truck.”

Unfortunately, that’s crap, and we liberals are supposed to be the smart ones, who can read, understand, and write English gooder than those slack jawed slope browed droolers on the far right. That opening phrase isn’t constructed as being in any way a condition upon the remainder of the sentence, it’s simply a justification… a rationalization, if you will. The author of that longish, rather badly constructed sentence was simply offering us his thoughts… basically, he (you can bet it was a ‘he’) was saying, “Because we don’t want all the guns to be in the hands of the authorities, we’re going to forbid the authorities from taking away the common folks’ guns. But we can’t say that, because it sounds pissy. So instead, we’ll say that the security of a free State depends on the people having the right to own and carry around weapons. That sounds like we’re saying the people need to be armed in order to fight off invading Hessians, but in point of fact, what we’re saying is they need to be armed in order to shoot up tax collectors, and those bastards from the surveyors’ office coming around to measure the elevations on our tobacco fields right before the gov’ment confiscates them and builds a damned road through the middle of ‘em.”

That opening phrase is an explanation and a justification for the actual Amendment, which is a very clearly phrased injunction against the government in any way interfering with an American citizen’s right to walk around as well armed as he or she wants to, wherever and whenever the hell they feel the need. “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is pretty damned unequivocal.

And, unlike many, I happen to think we should most likely stick to the Constitution as it happens to be written regardless of whether I personally like what it says or not, at least, until such time as we can modify it through further Amendments, or toss the goddam thing out, convene a new Constitutional Convention, and write up a newer, more modern one that not only guarantees us freedom of speech and assembly, but also to not be fired from the jobs we need to live for stupid ass reasons like our hairstyle, or what we choose to wear to work, or whether or not we have a picture of Wonder Woman in a bikini tacked up at our work station.

You can see my conflict. I don’t particularly want the real world equivalents of Homer, Moe, Carl and Lenny wandering around with six guns strapped to their hips (and I’m not at all reassured by the notion that I could go get a gun myself and throw some lead around too if I had too; I’m so scared of firearms I’d most likely shoot my own pecker off the first time I tried to draw the damn thing and fire it at something). At the same time, however, I’m of the opinion (as should be anyone with a fifth grade reading comprehension level) that the Constitution, which is (or should be) the law of the land, says “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. There’s really not much room for argument there. Throw in the fact that I’m not at all certain it’s really a good idea to entrust our authority figures with all the damn weapons (and if you don’t believe me, ask Jose Padilla… assuming you can get in to talk to him), and, well, you have a first rate quandary. I don’t want to live in a world where anyone with a few hundred bucks can walk into a pawnshop and purchase the ability to point their finger and strike me dead from ten yards away. On the other hand, I also don’t want to live in a world where Resident Bush and his pleasant, smiling storm troopers, who are so adept at rounding up swarthy humans and throwing them in jail cells, not to mention fomenting street fights in order to shut down court ordered recounts, are the only people with boom sticks. And, lastly, what I want doesn’t much matter; the Constitution clearly says that if Americans want to carry guns, that’s their right, and everyone who doesn’t like it (me or the government) can go climb a rope.

And so it is that we come to my sudden epiphany, involving the repeal of each and every conceivable gun control law, in exchange for which, our government passes sweeping legislation requiring that those who purchase and own and carry guns must, at all times, have insurance for said guns and the possible damages those guns might do.

As with an automobile, you could not purchase a gun without showing your proof of insurance first. As with an automobile, if a cop has cause to stop you for some reason, they can demand to see your proof of insurance, as well. (I suspect in most jurisdictions, walking around with a gun openly on your hip would be seen as sufficient cause, by cops and courts alike, to do a stop and frisk of that nature.)

Those who truly want to purchase, own, and/or carry weaponry on them will, certainly, find a way to come up with the extra cash for their insurance policies, and one can certainly expect that the premiums on those policies will be adjusted upward, based on various factors equivalent to one’s driving record, age and gender demographic (men being more likely to blow someone’s head off over a Pacers score than women, you’d think), and the performance characteristics of one’s machine. Which is to say, those with a history of violence would most likely pay more for gun insurance (assuming they could find a carrier willing to assume the risk) than those who have exercised forbearance, in much the same way someone who drives like a maniac has to pay more for insurance than someone who is more careful.

Young men would almost certainly pay more for gun insurance than old women, and I have little doubt that few carriers would even offer policies on automatic weaponry, while the premiums for .357 Magnums and automatic shotguns would be considerably higher than, say, those for .22 target pistols.

Equally important to my mind is the fact that the government would no longer be defying its own Constitution, which in my opinion, all State mandated carry laws do. (Again, as I’ve tried to explain, I like gun control, and I preferred living in New York State, where you can’t carry a big KNIFE on the street without a permit, to Florida, where I’ve seen people openly wearing machetes on their belts, and where any damned idiot can keep a gun of any sort in their vehicle or home without any kind of permit at all, while getting a permit to actually carry one concealed is very nearly as difficult as getting a learner’s permit… albeit, I admit, it is more expensive. However, the fact that I like gun control doesn’t change the fact that the Constitution specifically forbids it, and therefore, in America, it is illegal.)

Instead of the government exercising restraint over people’s right to bear arms, private enterprise would be. The insurance companies would be basically telling people that sure, they can have own a .357 magnum if they really want one, but the premiums will be higher, and if you want to buy insurance to carry the damned thing on you all the time, the price goes up further still. As the Republicans like to say, we wouldn’t need gun control laws, the market would operate for us instead.

Probably most important is that with such a mandated insurance law on the books, we would clearly establish a legal precedent for suing not only gun buyers, but also gun manufacturers and distributors. If we require everyone in the arms food chain to insure munitions at each step of the journey from manufacture to eventual retail (or street) sale, we accomplish several things. First, we neatly make the really horrific weapons - the automatic street-sweeping shotguns and machine pistols, the small muzzle loading grenade launchers - de facto illegal, because no insurance company in its right mind is going to issue a policy on that stuff. I’m not naïve enough to think that will keep it from hitting the streets anyway, but as I say, if it’s uninsured, it will be, defacto, illegal, and give law enforcement a reason, simply by its existence, to confiscate it, arrest its users and distributors, and launch civil suits against the manufacturers.

As a little side filip, well, we make legal guns more expensive, since manufacturers and distributors will pass their insurance costs down the line (and, of course, the additional cost of the gun policy itself has already made most gun ownership more expensive, too).

Arguments can certainly be made that (a) uninsured, illegal weapons will sell even better under such a policy, since they’ll be much, much cheaper than the insured weapons, and (b) the effect of such a policy will be to restrict legal gun ownership to the wealthy. As to the first, the market doesn’t work that way; uninsured, illegal weapons will necessarily sell cheaper than legitimate insured ones, but only just barely cheaper, since outlaw vendors will be out for a maximum return, given that they’re risking confiscation of all their stock and jail time, too, every time they sell a gun without papers.

As to the second, cars are extremely expensive, and they have to be registered and insured out the wazoo, yet pretty much every adult person in our culture has one anyway, and would scream bloody murder if the government tried to in some way restrict their usage, too. There is no sane argument that can be made in which guns are as vital to the maintenance of most people’s lifestyles as their cars are, and even if current prices on weapons doubled overnight, they’d still be an order of magnitude less expensive than automobiles. So, I suspect, under a system where mandatory gun insurance took the place of individual State licensing and carry laws, the people who really wanted guns would have them, and the government itself wouldn’t be involved in a clearly illegal infringement on the rights of Americans.

Just a thought. I’m not an experienced politician and am certainly in no way a genius, so there may be other problems with it that I just can’t see that make it unworkable.