We Love Shooting But Hate Voting

We hate voting and no one here can say otherwise honestly. We hate being in the minority of a decision. Studies show being proven wrong causes our ego, our inner sense of self, actual pain similar to physical pain. We’re a nation of leaders, we make our own way and damn the consequences! That sentiment is really not even antithetical to the founding principles of our nation. As James Otis said, our revolution was ignited by taxation without representation; it’s one thing to tax a population, it’s a whole other when that population doesn’t even get a say in it. The firebrands that railed against the king wanted a say in it, and eventually they got that. But ours was not a truly popular revolution, indeed it’s safe to say ours was an uprising of the elites, who were able to rouse the rabble to their cause. Peyton Randolph was president of the First Continental Congress but before that he was the son of a knight and Oxford educated. John Hancock, he of the massive signature, was worth 1/7000th of the entire country’s GDP. Half the founding fathers owned colossal estates and plantations and few of them were self-made men. This led to an innate bias in our country’s founders. They did not trust the common man to make his own decisions. The Senate, the more powerful Congressional house, was achieved only by appointment by state legislatures, not by popular elections. The Electoral College was an attempt to balance electoral power among the states while also providing a buffer between popular sentiment and the White House. And, most importantly, only property-owning white men could vote. The Founders, brilliant and brave and brash as they were, were also wholly convinced that only they and their elite peers could be trusted with the burden of governance. It wasn’t until the election of 1828 where the landowning requirement was largely removed for white men. The rest of the nation would have to wait over a century.

While the vote went through a veritable gauntlet to get where it is now, the right to shoot had a different path. First inscribed in that most august of amendments, the right to bear arms only met its first challenge in 1934 with the National Firearms Act, which enacted a tax on manufacturing and sale of certain firearms and required registration of all manufactured firearms. 1968 saw the prohibition of felons, drug users, and “mentally incompetent” from purchasing firearms. 1994 saw waiting periods added to the act of gun purchasing. Beyond these, purchasing a gun is still widely allowed and encouraged nationwide and is an assumed right as stated in the Constitution.

Beyond the national level, different states follow different procedures in regards to voting and gun rights. In Hawaii you must apply for a permit to purchase a handgun. Not so in Alabama. Same principle applies to voting rights. In Oregon every resident is automatically registered to vote and all voting can be done by mail whereas Alabama regularly purges its voter rolls and offers no early voting whatsoever. So Alabama is more concerned with people abusing their right to vote than their right to bear arms. Georgia allows a person to pass a background check and walk out of a firearms dealer in minutes with a new gun, which is great in my opinion. When it comes to voting, Georgia routinely closes polling places in high-population areas, forcing people to wait in line for hours to fill out a piece of paper? And Georgia just passed a law saying you can’t bring your buddy in the voting line a sandwich if he missed his lunch break waiting. We are always so hyper-vigilant that the government not interfere in our ability to shoot things that we’ll just blissfully ignore them making it harder for us to vote them out of office. If politicians wrote laws saying only certain people in their districts could own guns we would march in the streets and burn buildings down but when they gerrymander their districts to ensure minority parties NEVER get a say we just go about our day like that’s something normal for a healthy democracy. Florida held a popular referendum allowing convicted felons to vote. Instantly the legislature added the caveat that only felons who paid their fines could vote. That doesn’t seem like a major deal but IMAGINE if that happened with gun purchases. The NRA would be howling from the mountaintops begging us for money so they could fight the injustice and also buy Wayne LaPierre a new private plane.

I know the audience I write to. I know we’ve been told by our news anchors and local reps that making it harder for people to vote is a good thing. That we’re fighting that omnipresent voter fraud that will surely destabilize our entire nation if left unchecked. But ask yourself. What really is the difference between our guns and our votes? A prominent argument against the second amendment is that the Founding Fathers could have never anticipated a SAW rifle and rocket-propelled grenades. We dismiss these arguments out of hand. But those most wise gentlemen ALSO couldn’t fathom letting us poor vote, let alone black people or *gasp* women. If we can organize Rod and Gun Clubs and blast Tannerite with our guns, why cant we also ensure easy voting? So many of us profess no fear of mass shootings because “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” but we don’t apply the same logic to voting. When a bad guy with a gun kills a middle school we remain steadfast that it wasn’t the gun but the precautionary measures that doomed the children. We avoid the reactionary response of banning guns. However, even the threat of losing elections, fair or otherwise, has us clamoring to deprive our fellow Americans of their basic human rights. What is the difference between House resolutions attempting to ban AR-15s and state laws skirting as close to illegality as possible to assure only certain people vote. Here’s the final question. If we abide such unconstitutional measures when it is happening to our political adversaries, what is to stop it from them eventually employing those same tactics against us? Remember not to bring a drink next time you vote. You could get slapped with a misdemeanor in Georgia.