“In the wake of President Barack Obama’s latest attempt to circumvent Congress and implement stricter gun controls through “executive action,” a broader discussion over the continued necessity of the Second Amendment is sure to follow.
As a Midwest transplant, one of the first things I noticed after moving to my leafy New Jersey suburb was how few of my neighbors had ever even seen a real gun let alone held or fired one. Where I grew up, which at the time was a semi-rural outlier of Chicago, shooting guns was just part of who we were.
I shot my dad’s M1 Carbine; several of my friends had small bore shotguns and even a few pistols. We all could aim straight and true. Never once was anyone even close to being injured. When you grow up with responsible gun ownership pounded into you by unforgiving teachers like my 1st U.S. Marine Division Korean War veteran father, you very quickly come to appreciate their deadly seriousness and treat them with proper respect.
Several years ago I found myself pondering the meaning of the Second Amendment beyond the traditional argument that armed civilians are a check against the tyrannical inclinations of government. Rather, I considered its broader meaning through the prism of a regional catastrophe.
From Oct. 29-31, 2012, Hurricane Sandy laid waste to much of New Jersey’s coastal region, flooding and washing away homes, ripping down power lines, paralyzing cable, internet, and telecom services, shuttering businesses, and halting food and gasoline shipments to some of most densely populated areas of the most densely populated state.
Watching the chaos unfold in the storm’s wake, I was privy to a disconcerting fact of life: we in advanced societies have grown utterly dependent upon modern transportation and technology, but that doesn’t make us any more civilized than our medieval ancestors. All it takes to regress to our more lawless days is to turn out the lights, shut off the heat, close the supermarkets and make gasoline scarce; then you will see the baser elements of our human nature unleashed in no time.
After Sandy, the hum of generators and chainsaws and sirens was the ambient sound of my neighborhood. But there was also an undercurrent of subtle fear—much more so as you ventured into the less affluent parts of the surrounding area.
Fear that winter was coming and the power may not be restored for a long time. Fear that there would not be enough gasoline to fuel the chugging portable generators that were all that stood between limited vestiges of civilization and a cold, dark reality. One could sense the anxiety as people waited in the cold for hours in literally half-mile long lines, praying that the sign “Sorry No Gas” would not appear before their little red canisters had their fill.”
by Brad Schaeffer
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