The 1^st of October was a bad day, I watched the news on television in dismay, as I seem to frequently do these days.  Fifty eight people killed and hundreds injured by a gunman in Las Vegas.  Over a few days I thought about this and continued watching news bulletins and the discussion on gun control and the right to bear arms.  I recall previously seeing Barak Obama on television, lamenting the illegal use of guns in the United States and attempting to convince people that gun possession needed to be controlled.  He failed, but from news reports not for the want of trying.  The gun lobby and politics were a powerful block on any movement in that direction.

The present incumbent Donald Trump does not seem to have much to say about the matter other than the usual platitudes that come out at a time of national disaster.  So my thoughts turned to politics and ideology.  I can’t profess to know much about American politics or the American Constitution but as I understand it, the right to bear arms is written into the Constitution. The debate about whether the Second Amendment intended that ordinary citizens had the right to bear arms or the right to bear arms was intended for the militia is one that has continued for many a decade and it seems the courts, not without some dissent, fell on the side of the citizen.

As I continue to try to make sense of it all, I question what was intended by those great people that drafted and redrafted and finally agreed the American Constitution.  If the very people that debated and drafted the constitution were to consider the matter now, in contemporary society, knowing the advanced technology and the damage that firearms have caused across America, including the illegal use of firearms in the name of the law, would they have drafted the second amendment in such a way?

Of course we can think about this concept a little wider and apply it to various ideologies across the world.  Take the concept of free speech, would those that drafted the various constitutions and rights in many a country have foreseen that the concept of free speech would be used to spread hate against various groups of people?  Did they intend that free speech would be used to adulterate and twist religious texts so that hate could be espoused and acted upon?

These rights were drafted and agreed in a different era.  Those that espoused them could perhaps not have conceived that they would be abused to the extent they are now or that the concepts would cause so much damage and misery. If we could bring all those great minds together now, would they amend those rights perhaps putting some stipulations on them?

I have a feeling that many a great mind would turn in their graves at these notions and of course I understand it is not quite so simple but I do just wonder? Is freedom too great a price to pay?