Marvin J. Wolf

GUEST COLUMNIST

What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they drafted the Second Amendment? According to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and three fellow justices, the Second was “a response to concerns... that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several states.”

Hence the Amendment begins, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State....”

According to the National Rifle Association, many elected officials and millions of gun owners, that wasn’t it at all. The Second, they say, was meant to give Americans the right and the means to resist if the government tried to oppress their freedom.

Like if the government forced you to buy seatbelts for your car. And airbags. And liability insurance. If you refuse, the government can fine you or put you in jail.

It wasn’t that long ago when many people in our wonderful but flawed country thought that seatbelt laws were an unconstitutional infringement on freedom. Today many think that requiring adults to buy health insurance is tyranny.

Now suppose that some government agency employed police officers who stopped men with tattoos and shot them to death for no reason. Wouldn’t that suggest that sooner or later, every tattooed man was at risk of government oppression in the form of a bullet (or 16) fired into their body?

Wouldn’t every tattooed man want a gun? Wouldn’t he be justified in shooting any police officer whom he felt threatened him?

What if it wasn’t tattooed men fearing for their lives whenever a police officer was around, but albinos. People lacking skin pigment. If the police stopped albinos on the street, or stopped their cars, then shot them for no reason, wouldn’t every albino want a gun to use if a police officer came into view?

Lately, and for quite some time, some police officers have found a reason to shoot not those lacking skin pigment, but those with a lot of it. Black people. Brown people. People with dark skin. And most of those officers paid no penalty for killing a dark-skinned man.

If you were a person with dark skin, wouldn’t you feel that your government was oppressing people like you? Wouldn’t you feel that the Second Amendment entitled you to get a gun and use it to protect your freedom to breathe?

Isn’t that what just happened in Dallas?

Wait. Back up. Why, exactly, do you believe that the Second Amendment protects your individual right to own a gun, and that the reason for that amendment was to give citizens the right to resist a dictatorial government by force of arms? The right to shoot police? To join a gang or militia and attack a government installation?

The Supreme Court ruled in 1876 that “The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution.” In 1939, the Court said that the government could limit any weapon type not having a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”

Why did the 2008 Supreme Court reverse those findings and say that the Second Amendment gave Americans the right to own and carry a gun?

Because the National Rifle Association, a few decades back, created a sure-fire marketing technique to serve the goals of the NRA’s principal constituency, gun and ammunition manufacturers. This technique has been so successful that there are now more handguns in private hands in our great nation than there are U.S. citizens.

Remember that if President Obama was elected, he was coming for your guns? And if he was re-elected, he was really coming for your guns? And when several Americans are shot by one or more deranged gunmen, and Obama goes on TV to say that this has to stop — then millions of people believed that he was finally coming for their guns?

Each time that Obama was coming for your guns, sales of guns and ammunition ballooned. By a lot.

Because the NRA has bought or bullied politicians — you know who they are — and over years of GOP administrations, packed the Supreme Court with men who could be bought or bullied into deciding that the Second Amendment was to protect us from tyrannical governments.

Nobody is coming for your guns. And the Second Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to shoot a cop.

Marvin J. Wolf served 13 years in the U.S. Army and was one of only 60 GIs to be commissioned an infantry officer from the ranks while serving in Vietnam—and the only one serving as a combat correspondent. His first book, The Japanese Conspiracy, was published in 1983. His 20th and most recent, Abandoned In Hell, The Fight For Firebase Kate, was voted the American Society of Journalists and Authors Best Book of 2015. He lives in Asheville.