i need some editing to my response paper final draft. I am going to attach my 2nd draft response paper. and here is the article : January 7, 2013 Issue , bookers for the television networks’ Sunday-morning political talk shows hit the phones, trolling for guests. They were seeking, among others, , public officials, and prominent citizens willing to defend the proposition that military-style munitions—high-powered semiautomatic assault rifles and pistols that can fire a round every second, use magazines holding as many as a hundred bullets of a type specially engineered to liquefy the insides of human beings, and be outfitted ILLUSTRAION BY TOM BACHTELL with accessories like grenade launchers, flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, pistol grips, and collapsible stocks—should continue to be readily available to all comers, with or without minimal background checks or waiting periods. The bookers came up empty. “We reached out to all thirty-one pro-gun-rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on this subject this morning,” David Gregory, of NBC, told his “Meet the Press” audience. “We had no takers.” The National Rifle Association, which had instantly deactivated its Facebook page and silenced its Twitter feed, refused all interview invitations and issued a statement explaining—admitting?—that it was shutting its big mouth “as a matter of common decency.” It was hard, in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, to find a presentable advocate for (The No. 2 cause, presumably, is a surplus of people, since people, not guns, kill people.) “Fox News Sunday” and its host, Chris Wallace, had to settle for Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas. , a birther and a climate-change denier, is normally dismissible as an amusing eccentric, a self-lampooning clown. Not this time. s chilling advice for Sandy Hook’s murdered principal—“ ”—has been widely quoted and widely deplored. What Gohmert said next has received less notice. Wallace pressed him further on why he thinks civilians should possess weapons like the M-4 (the Congressman’s choice) and the AR-15 (the school shooter’s choice and the top-selling rifle in the nation, notably in the past two weeks). “Well,” Gohmert replied, for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people. It insures against the tyranny of the government. If they know that the biggest army is the American people, then you don’t have the tyranny that came from King George. That is why it was put in there. That’s why, once you start drawing the line, where do you stop? After Sandy Hook, as after the Columbine horror, in 1999, and the dozens of mass shoot
ings since, many Americans, gun owners among them, wondered why any sane person would require a rapid-fire killing machine with a foot-long banana clip to feel safe in his or her home or person, let alone to take target practice, shoot skeet, or hunt rabbits. But, for Hobbesian gun nuts of Gohmert’s ilk, the essence of the Second Amendment, when all is said and done, is not about any of that. Its real, irreducible purpose is to enable some self-designated fraction of the American people, in a pinch, to make war against the American government— If the line you draw, then where, logically, you stop? In Georgian times, when the amendment was ratified, the most fearsome weapon anyone, soldier or civilian, could carry was a single-shot musket. ? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down black helicopters, people with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles shoot down black helicopters”? Gohmert is a fringe figure, but the fringe is as long President Obama has been uncharacteristically passionate and unusually resolute in his determination to push for stronger gun controls early in the upcoming session of the new Congress. Not even Lyndon Johnson, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, could extract those from an overwhelmingly Democratic House and Senate. —a renewed ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, a requirement for background checks of buyers at gun shows, and the appointment, after six years of Republican obstruction, of a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives— Presidential leadership, America is alone among the advanced democracies of the world in suffering from an unending epidemic of gun mayhem. our politicians so much more cowardly, our legislators so much more corruptible than theirs? Or is our creaking, clanking political and governmental machinery so clogged with perverse incentives and exploitable bottlenecks that getting anything done requires our elected leaders to be courageous (and our citizens engaged) than theirs ever have to be? In the Congress of the United States, the odds are always stacked against success. Encouraged by a Supreme Court that has, in effect, abolished the “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment, Republican leaders—who retain control of the House of Representatives despite their candidates’ having polled a million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents and who, though a Senate minority, can wield the stopping power of the filibuster— . But . And Barack Obama, who responded to the massacre of the children of Sandy Hook first as a parent and then as a President, can at least be a prophet.