Tamara Holmes and son, Trenton, lay flowers outside of church in Charleston, S.C., USA 

One of the hardest balances to strike in a modern democracy is the balance between freedom and love. People who love one another want each other to be safe from criminals hidden among the members of the community and from foreign invaders who would force their way onto the territory of the democratic country if they could and then take from citizens their goods or their lives. 

The tricky part is what we face when we try to insure that honest citizens are protected while also allowing all people in the country to move about freely, assemble peacefully, and express their opinions when they wish to. 

What we want is for people to be able to go about their business secure in their persons and their property so that the whole community can flourish and grow, always aiming to keep drawing closer to the goal of creating a respectful community, with prosperity, dignity, and freedom for all. 

The hard part lies in detecting and neutralizing those among us who would by trickery or by force take things that they have not earned from the rightful owners of those things. We want to stop the thieves and con men. They are like leeches on the body of the community, sucking away its lifeblood and giving only more treachery in return. 

In the U.S., the murder on Wednesday night of 9 African-Americans attending a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, dramatized once more what this love-freedom balance is about. That shooting has stunned the nation and the world yet again. When he spoke of the event, President Obama looked like a dad in the morgue identifying the body of a beloved child. Millions of us, right now, are thinking, "Surely to God, not again. This can't be happening again." But it is. 

The murder rate in the U.S. is four or five times the rates found in all other countries of the developed world. Those of us in other lands who admire and love America are in disbelief once again. This so decent nation surely should be able to solve this problem. Maybe not in a day or a year, but gradually and steadily in real numbers in the real world. Reduce the numbers of homicides down to levels like those found in Western Europe and Canada. Surely it should be possible to take reasonable legal, economic, and social measures that reduce those numbers. 

Unfortunately for the Americans, their constitution gives citizens a right to bear arms, a right that will likely not be restricted in any meaningful way for the foreseeable future, if ever. Also unfortunately, Americans have so far been unable to face the fact that the second amendment was written at a time and in a society that was very different from the way the world is now. Jefferson's original intention in the second amendment, i.e. of citizens keeping the government honest by their being armed, no longer makes sense. Ordinary people armed with sporting arms or even assault weapons would not be able to stop a tyrant, if such a person gained control of the U.S. Armed Forces, or even slow that tyrant down very much. The armed forces today are much more sophisticated, so much beyond the abilities of ordinary citizens in killing power, intelligence gathering, and in fact every other activity involved in doing organized, sustained violence to human beings, that citizen resistance against a modern army in the hands of a dictator seems almost a pathetic concept. If the U.S. Marines really did come to occupy an American town, the local people wouldn't slow them down for anything more than a few days.

Instead, the net effect of the second amendment in this time has been to make it absurdly easy for people to settle disputes or even just give vent to impulsive anger by means of their guns. 

And still that immovable second amendment defies those who are so weary of the killing. 

Or is it immovable? 

I am no lawyer and no expert on U.S. constitutional law. However, it seems to me that if local governments in some states are permitted to ban or severely restrict automatic weapons, multi-shot magazines, and so on - which they are - then there is the thin edge of the wedge that peace-loving people need to begin to make real progress toward stopping the madness. 

Groups of people who really don't want guns roaming about in their communities and too easily falling into the hands of incapable people might be able to band together and create towns and cities of their own. They then could pass laws which require all citizens inside the common space to travel unarmed, or perhaps be allowed to transport sporting arms from a locked cabinet in their homes into the wilds where they can be used legitimately to hunt game, where the law permits. Then the spaces in which firearms are truly controlled could be expanded as new people who just wanted to raise their families in peace chose to move into the safer towns. 

These kinds of towns and cities would be living examples of a balance of citizens' rights and the rights of society, a balance of freedom and love created by the nuanced intervention of wisdom. 

A law banning anyone other than officers of local, state, and federal agencies from carrying guns would be enforceable and fair. Cameras and guards on the entrances to airports, malls, etc. already exist. To build safer towns, we would only need to expand on already existing practices. And hunters who just wanted to shoot some ducks or a deer on the weekend would still be fully able to do so. In a few years, even the carrying of machetes, nunchakus, and so on would be under control. Restraint as a way of life would permeate the thoughts of the people.  

Essentially, this strategy is the one that was used by lawmen in the 1800's to clean up the Old West. Many brave and capable lawmen existed then. They were pretty tough hombres. And effective ones. If it could work for them, in those far more violent and lawless times, the strategy could work for us here and now. Calm, reasoned debate. Compromise. Local pockets of sanity, growing larger with each year that passes.

It could be done.            

                                                   Bass Reeves, lawman of the Old West