BANKERUPT by Ravi Subramanian

BANKERUPT by Ravi Subramanian

1

21st April 1999
Washington
Bill Clinton, President of the United States of America, walked into the
Central Rotunda, the large-domed circular room on the second floor of the
Capitol Building in Washington. An impressive ninety-six feet in diameter
and roughly double that in height, the Central Rotunda was the most
imposing part of the seat of the US Congress.
The events of the previous day were playing on Clinton’s mind. In a fatal
attack on Columbine High School, Colorado, two high-school-going
teenagers armed with assault guns walked the corridors firing
indiscriminately at everything in sight. The result was mind-numbing:
twelve students and one teacher dead, over twenty-five injured and
hundreds scarred for life. That Tuesday, the ugly side of guns had reared its
head once again.
Walking quietly around the room, a preoccupied Clinton revisited the
Democratic Party’s desperate attempt to curtail gun abuse in the USA. In
1992, when initially elected President, Clinton had become the first
presidential candidate in over eight decades to have run his campaign on
promises of stricter laws around gun control. He signed the Brady Bill,
which introduced a five-day mandatory waiting period for a gun purchase
and required local police to run background checks on buyers. He was also
a signatory to an Assault Weapon Ban (AWB) in 1994, which banned most
semi-automatic rifles and weapons. Why then did incidents like the
Columbine High School massacre take place? This was the thought running
through Clinton’s mind when he stopped.
In front of him hung a 12-foot by 18-foot eighteenth-century oil on
canvas painting by John Trumbull. For a long time he stood there staring at
it teary-eyed. ‘You,’ he said. ‘You are the one responsible for this. Mr
President. You. Thomas Jefferson. I blame you.’
The painting depicted Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of a
committee of five, presenting the Declaration of Independence (DOI) to the
then President John Hancock and the Second Continental Congress on the
28th of June 1776 at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Right next to
the painting was a floor display unit, which held an image of the parchment
on which the DOI was written:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.
Clinton was not wrong.
At the time the constitution was being debated, eleven years after the
DOI, the fathers of the DOI were worried that a strong central government
would trample upon the rights of the individual. A need was felt to protect
the constitutional rights of the American citizen—rights that are guaranteed
and are not at the whims and fancies of any government. This was seen to
be in line with the DOI, which clearly said that governments must derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed.
On 15th December 1791, ten amendments to the constitution were
ratified. One of them was the Bill of Rights, commonly referred to as the
Second Amendment:
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people
to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment conferred on the Americans the right to keep
and bear firearms. This made it very easy to own assault-grade firearms in
most American states. Most of the Republicans and gun rights lobbyists
argued that any alteration of this fundamental right could only be brought
about by modifying the Second Amendment, and that was only possible
through a change in the constitution. For which one needs to go back to the
people. The last line in Jefferson’s DOI came back to haunt independent
America.
Clinton sighed as he walked away from the Central Rotunda. He was
getting late for a meeting of the standing committee of the senate which had
been formed to discuss changes to the Second Amendment.

BANKERUPT by Ravi Subramanian