A 9-year-old girl recently shot and killed her gun instructor in a horrible accident. Do 9-year-olds have the right to bear arms? I’d prefer they didn’t.

Forgetting the fact that forcing a 9-year-old into a situation where she now gets to have a lifetime of regret, which is tantamount to child abuse, when is the last time you heard a story about a city being overrun by gang violence and the people organizing together to run them out of town?

The answer: never.

You’ve never heard that story happening in real life.

We’d all like to believe in the myth of heroes amongst us banding together to kick the criminals out of town, but it’s more likely that they’d be an unregulated mob killing people in the streets.

Gun control is a never-ending conversation in the United States.

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, there was no way that our Founding Fathers could have conceived what their country would become generations later.

The Congress couldn’t agree on a definitive Constitution. To get everyone on board with the document in its final form, an agreement was made that there would be a citizen’s Bill of Rights. The divided Congress ratified the Constitution in good faith because a Bill of Rights was on the way.

The Bill of Rights, what became the first 10 amendments to our Constitution, is clearly what was most important at the time when our country was still being moulded.

It’s arguable that our right to free speech was of paramount importance because it was the First Amendment.

What we know is that the authors wanted U.S. citizens to be able to overthrow a government of tyranny, like they had, so they drafted 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 gray area is whether or not they intended for every citizen to have the right to “keep and bear arms,” or if they meant the people within the “well regulated militia” had the right to bear arms.

Although this point has been argued in the courts, by the media and person-to-person, one thing remains clear: it does not say “poorly regulated militia” or “unregulated militia.”

The one thing that is absolutely evident is that the authors wanted a well-regulated ability to overthrow a tyrannical government and maintain a free state.

And at this point in our society, we don’t even need guns to do that. We simply have to show up on Election Day, and vote to change our government.

The problem is that people have taken the Second Amendment to mean that every single citizen has the right to have guns for their own reasons, despite this being a political document.

People against adding more gun restrictions argue that people that commit murder and shoot up schools are already breaking laws, and more laws won’t fix the issue. However, the answer is not: “do nothing.”

What is the answer? We need a do-over.

The Bill of Rights, and perhaps the Constitution and other amendments, needs to be revised for the modern era.

There is a problem with that is who is going to do it? Our representatives are so polarized and wedged into their lefts and rights, that they cannot even agree to disagree.

When the government can learn to agree that there are problems, then we’ll at least have a starting point to fix them.

Should we have a Constitutional Convention? Should government committees put together their own revised versions of individual amendments and put them to nationwide votes?

The Second Amendment needs to be more specific. If the Founding Fathers wanted us to have machine guns, it should be stated as such.

If we can bear arms, what about ammo? The Second Amendment says nothing about ammo. Maybe we’re supposed to make it ourselves, you know, like they did, so we avoid easy-access ammo that makes it easier to actually use the gun you own.

How many tragedies do we need to have before someone from both sides of the political spectrum comes forward and says we need to fix the problem?