I had just finished working out and was leaving the Senior Center, when I noticed a woman reading a Time magazine article. On its cover read, What Would Lincoln Have Done? I knew immediately what that title was referring to, which was the Congressional Gun Control Debate. That would have indeed been a good question to ask President Abraham Lincoln because within the answer to the question resides a moral imperative, and who better to answer such a question but Lincoln?

What Would Lincoln Have Done?

Prior to my writing What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?:How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way, I wrote first the book The Impotent Giant: How to Reclaim the Moral High Ground of America’s Politics. Lincoln provided the center piece for that book as President Washington provided the central focus for my Founding Fathers’ treatise.

One thing both presidents had in common were their splendid characters; the integrity of each was superb. As presidents, whenever they had to make executive decisions, they used their moral compasses in the best way they knew how, in their effort to serve all of the people all of the time.

Both men viewed the Constitution as their nation’s bible, and used it accordingly.

Since Washington served as ‘president’ of the convention when our Constitution was written, when he became our country’s first president, he was intimately familiar with the Constitutions provisions and the freedom foundations, which the framers of the Constitution called “virtues” and which form the means by which our nation’s freedoms are served and protected, all of which are incorporated in the Declaration of Independence.

Lincoln also was a ‘student’ of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Although he cherished both sacred documents, he particularly admired the Declaration of Independence and referred often to the passage in the declaration where it’s stated: “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.”

Two of the virtues which are integrally incorporated in our Constitution and are considered the most important of the four foundations of freedoms that provide the framework upon which the Constitution was written are called private and public virtues. Both virtues make up what the framers would describe as each citizen’s integrity, which is our ‘road map’ of how we should live our lives, regardless whether or not we are politicians or ordinary citizens.

We are all mandated to develop and follow our moral compass, which includes following our heart and serving our family and others in a responsible and compassionate way (private virtue), as well as, when called upon, we must be willing  to put aside our selfish interests for the greater good of our society (public virtue).

Lincoln was a pragmatist.  He clearly was a realist. The realities of the day simply helped contribute to his melancholic personality. That’s most understandable, considering the number of military deaths and undetermined number of civilian casualties which were occurring daily as a result of the civil war. As Commander-in-Chief of the union forces, Lincoln had to acknowledge the death and destruction that the civil war had brought upon our nation and he had to figure out what needed to be done to end the war, all of which contributed to his sad and heartbreaking demeanor.

The civil war remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. The death toll was estimated at ten percent of all Northern males 20 – 45 years old and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18-40.

Because of the civil war, Lincoln would have abhorred the needless deaths of innocent lives as occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting at Newtown, Connecticut.

Because our country isn’t politically ready for more “extreme” gun control  measures to be employed than what President Obama has proposed, I would not imagine Lincoln would be willing to do anything different from what Obama proposed.

Lincoln had a great sense of seizing the right moment at the right time. For example, he freely admitted that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law at just the correct time. He later said, “It is my conviction that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.”

However, because of his integrity, and being that he was one of the most empathic, compassionate and skilled politician we’ve ever had, like what he did getting public acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation first before signing it into law, he would once again wait for the optimum time when to introduce more drastic measures to prevent assault weapons with magazine clips from continuing to be sold, at which time he would sign an executive order banning the sale of such weapons in the future.