1.
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 :
Shots
By
Hendrik Hertzberg
January 7, 2013 Issue
Within hours of the unspeakable massacre of twenty first
graders and six teachers and staff members at the Sandy Hook
Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday,
December 14th
, bookers for the television networks’ Sunday-morning political
talk shows hit the phones, trolling for guests. They were
seeking, among others,
politicians
, 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.

2.
“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.”
When it finally opened that mouth, a week later, out came a
demand for N.R.A.-trained guards in every single American
school: a hundred thousand schools, a hundred thousand guards,
a hundred thousand guns, a hundred million dollars in new
business for the N.R.A.’s “corporate partners” in the gun
industry.
It was hard, in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, to find a
presentable advocate for
the view that the No. 1 cause of gun violence is a shortage of
guns.
(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.
Representative Gohmert
, a birther and a climate-change denier, is normally dismissible
as an amusing eccentric, a self-lampooning clown. Not this
time. His chilling advice for Sandy Hook’s murdered
principal—“
I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up, so
when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to
lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him
out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids
”—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

3.
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?
“It runs on hybrids.”
After Sandy Hook, as after the Columbine horror, in 1999, and
the dozens of mass shootings 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—
to overthrow it by force and violence, if that is deemed
necessary.
If
that’s
the line you draw, then where, logically,
do
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.
And today
? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down

4.
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
as an AR-15’s barrel. His seditious fantasies of freelance
insurrection are shared by a nontrivial portion of the N.R.A.
membership and board, by the N.R.A.’s feral kid brother, the
Gun Owners of America, and by a gaggle of locked-and-loaded
politicians who, not long ago, were threatening “Second
Amendment remedies” for policy offenses like the Affordable
Care Act.
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.
The most obviously sensible solutions, such as registering guns
like cars and licensing their owners like drivers, are universally
and, alas, correctly seen as out of reach.
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.
But lesser steps
—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—
are, for the first time in nearly a generation, imaginable.
There is, for the moment, a perceptible change in the weather.
Even a change in the climate, though, may not be enough.
Separating the Gohmerts from the mass of less fanatical
devotees of “gun rights” will be necessary but not sufficient.
The same is true of “
Presidential leadership,
” desirable though it is.
America is alone among the advanced democracies of the world
in suffering from an unending epidemic of gun mayhem.
Are

5.
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
more
courageous (and our citizens
more
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—
have scarcely wavered in their opposition to anything beyond
bromides about violent movies and mental health
. But
even if the effort to curb the killing fails, as it may, or falls
short, as it surely will, it is worth making
. 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.
♦