Guns Kill People Too

 

Guns Kill People, Too

It is commonly stated by Second Amendment enthusiasts that guns don’t kill people, people do. This truism has a point in that guns, as inanimate objects, are inert.  As such, guns do not have the capacity to “do” anything—they merely exist. The slogan underlies a related one; that people have the capacity to take human life in many ways—whether through knives, bare hands, or scarves. The fundamental problem with these claims is twofold. One is the failure to distinguish between proximate and ultimate cause. While the killer is the ultimate cause of the crime, the weapon is a proximate one. The other is the significance of scale as exemplified in the most recent mass killings in Las Vegas.

This sophistry (guns don’t kill people) only matters in a political climate where the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, a position that is based on two propositions.  The first associates the amendment as a constitutional guarantee of individual gun ownership decoupled from the extenuating circumstance of the need for a well-regulated militia or some reasonable contemporary analog.  The second links that right to the rejection of any regulations of guns, as if any restriction is an unacceptable violation of the spirit of the amendment. Without the linkage of the first (an intrinsic relationship between a militia and individual right of gun ownership), there is no Second Amendment basis for the second. This is not synonymous with denying the right of individual citizens to possess guns, as established by legislation.  However, it does argue against complaints that to enact reasonable regulations is to violate the “sacred” principles of the Second Amendment right of individuals to bear arms.

To unpack this, the Second Amendment, states: “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.” One can put the emphasis on one clause or the other; either way, the key factor is the relationship between the need for a citizenry-based militia for securing a free state and the right of the citizenry to bear arms for that purpose. There are direct contemporary equivalents between the other nine amendments of the bill of Rights and a broad range of issues in our current area.  On the Second Amendment, a call for an 18^th century need for a well-regulated militia remains a sticking point—an anachronism—which simply has no common parallel given the professionalization of the nation’s police force and military.  In our era, any notion of a “militia,” is all-too-readily linked with right wing fringe movements associated with the names of Waco, Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge.

Any self-respecting constitutional originalist, seeking to interpret the Bill of Rights as its founders meant it, would categorically reject the contention that the Second Amendment provides sufficient justification for an individual right to bear arm without regard to the sticking matter of a citizenry-based militia or its contemporary equivalent.   For decades the Supreme Court rejected such decoupling, as exemplified in the position of former Chief Justice Warren Burger, who contended that the individual rights argument, as a stand-alone, is a “fraud” (Dahlia Litwick, “Bloody Heller”). This long-standing precedent was recently uprooted by the tortured arguments of so-called “originalist Supreme Court justices in two decisions in 2008 and 2010, that simply downgraded the emphasis on the militia, dubiously referring to it as merely a “prefatory clause” as if the public rationale in justification of the amendment was a mere historical secondary matter.

There has never been a single legal mind on the legitimate interpretation of the Second Amendment.  Played out within history, protagonists have staked their claims more on political ideology than any quest for philosophical consistency.  That so, I cannot fathom how the Second Amendment can be properly interpreted without coming to a reasonable assessment which accounts for both clauses in its admittedly ambiguous one sentence statement.

At best, the Second Amendment, as drafted by the Bill of Right founders, has a modest sort of application in our current society, particularly from an originalist perspective, and, at worst, is an 18^th century constitutional leftover.  That said, whatever justifications made in support of the Second Amendment, given the widespread disseminations of arms of all types and the pandemic of violence at all levels of rhetorical and physical manifestation in our society, some sensible response is in order.  As Bill Doak noted in his 10-05 editorial, deep-rooted cultural forces are at work in this land which extend well beyond the power of any regulations of firearms to resolve.

In this, critics of fire arms regulation are half right: No “reasonable” regulation, which 90% of the population supports, will, by itself, dramatically reduce the 30,000 instances of deaths caused by firearms use in this nation in a single year.  However, some modest first steps could play a role in moving our historical trajectory in a more enlightened direction which can lead to a lessening of these unacceptable numbers. The nation made a good first step in the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, enacted in 1994, which required background checks “before a firearm may be purchased from a federally licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer.” This was supplemented by the 1994 Federal Weapons Assault Weapons Ban, which outlawed purchase of semi-automatic weapons, which Congress failed to re-authorize in 2004.  Since then, NRA lobbying has been relentless, as reflected in the shameless defeat of the Manchin-Toomey gun bill in the Senate in response to the massacre of first and second graders in Sandy Hook.  Meanwhile, the NRA is pushing legislation to loosen restrictions on purchasing gun silencers. This is moving the historical trajectory of the social impact of gun violence in the wrong direction. 

2017