Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Guns are an unusual product. When you study economics, you are taught that there is a balance between demand and supply. Demand is supposed to match supply. But in the case of guns, the supply creates further demand: the more we kill one another, the more Americans decide that they need guns to protect themselves. When a president says that all that he can do is pray, then what else are people supposed to conclude?

There is endless debate about the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, on the right to bear arms. Here is the problem, put simply. In recent decades, the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment means something that it plainly does not mean. It is clearly there to help “provide for the common defence” by way of a “well regulated militia.” The Second Amendment is part of a larger document that is meant to establish freedom and safety together by establishing the compact of non-violence known as the rule of law.

The error made by the Supreme Court is obvious in both principle and practice. If justices invent a right for everyone to have the means of easily killing anyone else, they are betraying a basic purpose of government, understood by the framers of the Constitution, which is to prevent a war of all against all and thereby make both freedom and safety possible.

In practical terms, the Supreme Court privatized violence, vastly enlarging an unregulated market for instruments of death. The bigger that market is, the more powerful its lobbyists become. They then artificially generate a nation where death seems normal and the only protection seems to be the ability to deal death oneself. And that is not only horrible in itself, but a very different kind of political system: the rule of blood not law, the angry anarchy that one ordains and establishes a Constitution to prevent.

We are all more free and more safe when we are not living in the shadow of mindless death. And so around the country, in municipalities and in states, laws are passed that would reduce this horror. They are overturned because the Supreme Court has misunderstood the traditions some its justices so ostentatiously claim to venerate, as well as the logic of the rule of law which is the basis of their office.’ (from his Substack)