Back in the days when I was a teenager in high school, there were frequent interviews in magazines with Europeans expressing their reluctance to visit the United States, which they perceived as the wild west with too many guns and too many shootings.
Compared to Europe, the United States was and is the wild west. For example, at that time, the U.S. murder rate was about five times that of England or Germany.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, these disparities between the U.S. and Europe doubled before declining in the 1990s. As a result, the U.S. has a murder rate more than four times that of 35 other developed nations.
Consequently, the U.S. can still be considered the wild west—and in some cases, worse. In many Western towns in the 19th century, men had to check their firearms as they entered a saloon. The craziness taking over this country is producing laws that authorize the wearing of concealed weapons, even in nightclubs. And many wear guns in church.
Some of this craziness was unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in its Heller decision in 2008 overturned centuries of settled law to declare that the Second Amendment provides an individual an almost unfettered right to own a gun.
Heretofore, Courts interpreted the Second Amendment as providing for the right of states to have an armed militia. What happened? According to many observers, including yours truly, the National Rifle Association (NRA) rewrote the Second Amendment.
As the NRA and its allies were shilling for gun manufacturers and espousing an individual right to own guns, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called their actions “a fraud on the American Public.” In 1990, this solid conservative expressed the widely held consensus of historians and judges that the Second Amendment did not grant an individual right to bear arms.
But the NRA was not deterred, and they eventually won over enough of the country to get a Supreme Court that would agree with this changing of the meaning of a sentence.
This ruling by the Supreme Court and the continued proliferation of guns—some designed only to kill people—may facilitate this country’s return to the days of widespread lynching of African Americans as mass shooters target Black folk.
This “enhanced” Right-Wing Supreme Court is now about to overturn Roe v Wade. While I disagree with the anti-abortion people, I must admire their long-haul opposition to abortion.
Why can’t the good guys—those opposed to the proliferation of weapons of mass killings (AR-15s and the like)—carry on a similar long-haul campaign against this worse than wild west show.
Yes, we must obey the law, but we should work harder to change it. But we must always remember that before the Heller decision by this Right-Wing Supreme Court the law was simply that there was no individual right to own and carry guns.
We must oppose the Heller Supreme Court decision and fight for overturning it. And we must be serious and persistent, just as anti-abortion forces did for nearly fifty years. We would push and/or change places of power, including the U.S. Supreme Court. We would have the support of many in the legal community who think the Supreme Court decided this case on the wrong basis. There should be no Constitutional right for individuals to bear AR-15s.
I am not above calling on English teachers to interpret the one-sentence 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.
Mrs. Wiggins, my old high school English teacher, would say that the phrase before the first comma delimits the rest of the sentence.