A plead for the Second

From his hospital bed Todd Smith, the reporter who was injured in the recent city hall shootings in Kirkwood, Missouri, not-so-subtly attempted to throw his hat into the ring of political advocacy.

It was opportunistic advocacy at its finest.

“I feel like I want to become an advocate for gun control—that’s the problem,” said Smith, who will undergo surgery on his the hand that was pierced by the madman’s bullet, in an interview broadcast on MSNBC on Saturday.

This is the kind of knee-jerk stance on a hotly-contested issue that makes fans of the second amendment squirm.

And while I am certainly not here to defend the right of any citizen to bear a shoulder-fired missile, I am a somewhat reluctant defender of the second amendment—though not on the premise of the constitution’s infallibility.

When Charles Lee Thornton entered city hall with guns blazing, he did so with a mind possessed by fury and the intent to kill.

Smith was quoted in the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis, dated today, about the nature of Thornton’s disposition upon entering the hall: "He was completely possessed," Smith said. "He just looked determined. He just shot the police officer without even a thought, and the guy just goes down."

That’s as good of a description of a maniacal killer as I’ve read—determination without forethought.

Inasmuch as Smith was able to aptly describe the demeanor of the killer at the time of the tragedy, he was far too hasty in his assessment of causation.

In truth, it was not Thornton’s access to a gun (or any weapon) that stimulated such mania as much as it was his physical and mental state at the up to the day of the shooting.

No amount of legislative coercion can prevent mentally deranged citizens from wreaking havoc on innocents if that is their desire.

What stopped Thornton in the end from the taking of more lives was not simple hopes and dreams, but a hail of gunfire from nearby law enforcement officers.

The overarching issue is demand, not supply.

The argument in play here, ironically, is similar to the one enlisted by many conservatives with respect to abortion.

For years many on the Right have argued unsuccessfully for a constitutional ban on abortion which is only a symptom of a larger problem: the desire to destroy the opportunity for life before conception.

Overturning settled law (Roe v. Wade in this case) would not magically take away the demand for abortions nor would further rescinding second amendment rights to law-abiding citizens put a stop to senseless violence.

The right to bear arms is not an unlimited good, but it is a right worth defending.

We live in a violent culture full of over-socialized people who, at their most extreme, will stop at nothing to right supposed wrongs and, at times, to use violence for its own sake.

Thornton and his ilk live neither in fear of the law or the gun. The best we can do as a society is to ensure that such people don’t have the choice.