We are saddened to tears over the massacre of 19 young children and two teachers in the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last week. An additional number were wounded but survived
This followed the white supremacist attack in Buffalo 10 days earlier that killed 10 innocent African Americans.
More and more people are falling victims to school shootings, such that now firearms have become the leading cause of death for young people, surpassing auto accidents.
And as usual there are increasing calls to do something about this gun violence. Quite appalling is how few of these calls mention the Second Amendment which was reinterpreted in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision in 2008.
Incredibly, I heard one of the good guys, the gun control advocates, say, “Of course, we must protect the Second Amendment,” as if that should be an issue for that side of the argument.
The Second Amendment was passed in 1789 as a part of the Bill of Rights. Here it is:
“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 Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: an absolutive clause (A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed). The absolutive clause, an adverbial clause, modifies the rest of the sentence
Many historians agree that the primary reason for passing the Second Amendment was to prevent the need for the United States to have a professional standing army. It was not originally intended to grant a right for private individuals to have weapons for self-defense.
But in 2008 the Right-Wing Supreme Court agreed with the NRA’s argument that it granted an individual right. And wild west America went berserk, such that now more and more states are passing concealed carry laws that require no permits, background checks, or safety training.
To show how awry we have gone, please note that on PBS in 1991 former Chief Justice Warren Berger said
“The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime”
During that same year the conservative Justice Berger wrote articles for the Associated Press in which he declared “The Second Amendment does not guarantee every person the unfettered constitutional right to have a machine gun.”
And that was approximately the position of the four dissenting Justices in the Heller decision.
So yes, we should obey the law that the Court has established, but we are free to disagree with it—and more importantly, to work to change it.
For that endeavor, we should emulate the anti-abortion forces, at least the non-violent part, and work unceasingly to change the ruling. Perhaps the first step in that process, once again following the anti-abortion crowd, is to keep up the rhetoric and change the politicians who appoint and confirm the justices for the Court.
Until the Second Amendment is repealed, or the Supreme Court drastically limits its scope we are going to keep reeling from one massacre to the next.
The weapons of choice used in many gun massacres like the Uvalde shooting and the Buffalo shooting were assault rifles, AR-15 type guns. Vice-President Kamala Harris has called for a renewed assault weapons ban.
We have been steadily going backwards. In 1994 a law was passed to outlaw assault weapons, which include AR-15s. But this law expired in 2004. The result was an increase in mass shootings and murders.
One comprehensive study showed the effect of the ban and its dissolution. Compared with the 10-year period before the ban, the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37 percent, and the number of people dying from gun massacres fell by 43 percent. But after the ban ended in 2004, the numbers shot up again — an astonishing 183 percent increase in massacres and a 239 percent increase in massacre deaths.
So obviously we should push for a more permanent ban on our way to repealing the Second Amendment or reducing its effects as recently reinterpreted.
We must push these more desirable actions, not just the weak position of pursuing what Republicans might like.