Columns

BENITEZ | Justifying the Second Amendment

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In my first-ever article for The Sun two years ago, I wrote that “U.S. legislators have failed to account for the thousands of victims of gun violence and have written off their deaths as an acceptable cost for the preservation of a 200-year-old constitutional amendment.”

I grew up in a Western nation often cited by advocates of gun control as a possible model for the United States. However, while I came to Cornell naïvely believing that defenders of the Second Amendment are of the irrational type who cling to their Bibles as tightly as they do to their weapons, living in this country has since moderated my liberal haughtiness. I now think that the typical theist is perhaps more justified in their religious beliefs than the most militant atheist and I also now think that there are some compelling justifications for the Second Amendment. The foremost case for the Second Amendment’s existence is that it insures against the possibility of government tyranny. While the principles of self-defense and tradition are also invoked to rationalize the Amendment, they are neither what the founders intended nor persuasive.

Arts & Culture

JONES | An Artist’s Place in the Gun Debate

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If you’re a fan of the rap group/radical-left hype-men Run the Jewels, you may have been surprised by the news this weekend. Rapper Killer Mike, who forms one-half of Run the Jewels with El-P, gave an interview with the NRATV host Colion Noir in which he seemed to agree with the NRA and guns-right activists that new gun-control laws are not a solution to gun violence, separating himself from the progressive left that he has often acted as a celebrity spokesman for. In the interview, Killer Mike accused guns rights activists of being “lackey[s] of the progressive movement,” adding that “I told my kids on the school walkout: ‘I love you — if you walk out that school, walk out my house.’”

To be fair, Killer Mike was not simply aping the NRA’s incendiary rhetoric — he was trying to make an argument about the need specifically for African-Americans in poorly-policed areas to be prepared to defend themselves against threats. Killer Mike apologized in two videos he filmed at home soon after the NRATV interview was posted online, saying that he had unintentionally allowed the NRA to post the video as a counter to the March for Our Lives on Saturday, March 24, a protest which he called “a very noble campaign that I actually support.” However, he has chosen to explicitly align himself with gun-rights activists in the past: he said on Tavis Smiley’s show on PBS last year that “White men don’t want to give up their guns, and I’m with that. If you don’t want to give up your guns, and I have that right — not privilege — but I have that right too, then I’m standing on your side of the room when they say, ‘Who’s for guns?’”

A less surprising attack on gun control activists came from Jesse Hughes, the frontman of Eagles of Death Metal.

Columns

MORADI | When Coming to Cornell Means Grappling With Guns

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“But it didn’t happen,” is the chill response I got from some friends (and my mom!) after learning that we may have been tiptoeing along the asymptote of terror. Apparently being on the brink of tragedy doesn’t cut it anymore, and why should it? Our generation found perverse unity in the wholly American constancy of lockdown drills, in the nonchalance of backpack searches and school security cameras. If you were to print the Wikipedia page for “List of School Shootings in the United States,” it would be 172 pages long. (For comparison, “List of awards and nominations received by Meryl Streep” is just 35.)

Gun violence is so routine that it’s easy to forget that we’re living in an international abnormality.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: The Radio Dept. — Running Out of Love

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Swedish, indie pop-rock group Radio Dept. walks the line between complacent and passionate. Their sound in Running Out of Love, released this October, mixes easy to listen to harmonies with fast paced, energetic beats and shocking lyrics. The three merge to unpack social frustrations. With an eerily calm tone, their lyrics call to mind serious issues and leave them unresolved.