The Second Amendment
There is too much gun violence in the United States, far more than in other wealthy countries. The obvious difference between us and countries like Canada or Germany is our lax gun laws, and the sheer amount of guns that have flooded our society.
That said, I understand Americans' fascination with guns. I had toy guns as a child. I went with my dad and with the Boy Scouts to the shooting range to practice my marksmanship. Jerry Cartmell, who served his community for decades as a cop, once took me to the police shooting range, where I fired a .38 revolver and a .45 automatic at human silhouette targets.
To this day, I enjoy video games like Mass Effect and Doom, which involve acquiring and utilizing ever more powerful weapons in order to defeat the bad guys. I do not, however, own a gun in real life, nor have I fired a real gun in decades.
I live in a quiet suburb, but gun violence is not an abstract concept to me. A friend of mine, police sergeant Mark Dunakin, was killed in the line of duty in Oakland several years ago. My wife teaches school at our local elementary school. After all the school shootings, I worry about her the same way I used to worry about Mark.
Do I want to ban all guns? No, but background checks and red flag laws are not enough. We need to get weapons of war off the streets. Let’s start with semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15.
The AR-15 is a very popular weapon. You can use it effectively with very little training. There are over 20 million of these rifles in the United States, and manufacturers sell upwards of 8 million each year.
It is also an incredibly vicious weapon. With some high powered rifles, the bullets rip right through the victim. Bullets from an AR-15, on the other hand, tumble through the air. When they hit someone, the bullet snowballs, tearing up the victim’s insides. You get hit with one of these things, even in the arm or the leg, you are likely to bleed out.
Remember, police in Uvalde Texas had to use DNA swabs to identify the victims of the shooting there, because the shooter's assault weapon caused such devastation the children were unidentifiable. A weapon of this lethality should not be in the hands of citizens. It is a weapon of war.
But, what about the Second Amendment? Let’s take a look at the Bill of Rights, Article II, from 1791: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
There’s two phrases at work here. Gun rights advocates tend to focus on the second phrase, while gun control advocates like me focus on the first. In 1791, the United States depended on citizen militias for defense. They were our armed forces, and, because we were such a fledgling country at that point, we needed them to bring their own guns. Those farmers and townspeople needed to be armed and ready in case of an invasion from Britain or another European power.
The “well regulated militia” of 1791 has not existed for over one hundred years. In its place, we have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Coast Guard, as well as our local police forces and sheriff offices. Join any of those organizations today, and you will not be required to bring your own weapon. If they need you to have one, they will give it to you, and when you are done with it, they will take it back.
If this well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the survival of the free State, then it is reasonable that the right to keep and bear arms can and should be infringed.
I realize that plenty of people disagree with me, and if you are one of them, I won’t hold it against you. More significantly, six people who disagree with me sit on the Supreme Court.
These justices are originalists. They look back on our history and traditions and seek to find the original intent of the authors of our Constitution and our earliest laws. These justices like to look back on the year 1791, when the difference between a military weapon and a hunting rifle was negligible. If I were a lawyer about to argue for an assault weapons ban before these justices, I would hire a historian, and I would point that individual at the great, great grandfather of the AR-15, the Gatling gun.
The Gatling gun, one of the earliest machine guns, was not a hand-held weapon. It was mounted either to a wagon or a ship, and it took four men to operate it. In 1886, it was capable of firing 400 rounds per minute.
If I were preparing a history lesson for the Supreme Court, I would want to know what was the original intent of this weapon, based on company marketing materials and the letters and diaries of its inventor, Richard Gatling. I would look for federal, local or even military regulations restricting the use of Gatling guns in crowded, urban areas. Were there any restrictions keeping citizens from owning this weapon of war? Or, was it simply understood that this weapon was the domain of our armed forces?
I would look, in short, through our traditions and history to find distinctions between citizens' guns, protected by the Second Amendment, and weapons of war. I would apply what I found to create reasonable regulations on other weapons, like the AR-15.
That said, I understand Americans' fascination with guns. I had toy guns as a child. I went with my dad and with the Boy Scouts to the shooting range to practice my marksmanship. Jerry Cartmell, who served his community for decades as a cop, once took me to the police shooting range, where I fired a .38 revolver and a .45 automatic at human silhouette targets.
To this day, I enjoy video games like Mass Effect and Doom, which involve acquiring and utilizing ever more powerful weapons in order to defeat the bad guys. I do not, however, own a gun in real life, nor have I fired a real gun in decades.
I live in a quiet suburb, but gun violence is not an abstract concept to me. A friend of mine, police sergeant Mark Dunakin, was killed in the line of duty in Oakland several years ago. My wife teaches school at our local elementary school. After all the school shootings, I worry about her the same way I used to worry about Mark.
Do I want to ban all guns? No, but background checks and red flag laws are not enough. We need to get weapons of war off the streets. Let’s start with semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15.
The AR-15 is a very popular weapon. You can use it effectively with very little training. There are over 20 million of these rifles in the United States, and manufacturers sell upwards of 8 million each year.
It is also an incredibly vicious weapon. With some high powered rifles, the bullets rip right through the victim. Bullets from an AR-15, on the other hand, tumble through the air. When they hit someone, the bullet snowballs, tearing up the victim’s insides. You get hit with one of these things, even in the arm or the leg, you are likely to bleed out.
Remember, police in Uvalde Texas had to use DNA swabs to identify the victims of the shooting there, because the shooter's assault weapon caused such devastation the children were unidentifiable. A weapon of this lethality should not be in the hands of citizens. It is a weapon of war.
But, what about the Second Amendment? Let’s take a look at the Bill of Rights, Article II, from 1791: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
There’s two phrases at work here. Gun rights advocates tend to focus on the second phrase, while gun control advocates like me focus on the first. In 1791, the United States depended on citizen militias for defense. They were our armed forces, and, because we were such a fledgling country at that point, we needed them to bring their own guns. Those farmers and townspeople needed to be armed and ready in case of an invasion from Britain or another European power.
The “well regulated militia” of 1791 has not existed for over one hundred years. In its place, we have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Coast Guard, as well as our local police forces and sheriff offices. Join any of those organizations today, and you will not be required to bring your own weapon. If they need you to have one, they will give it to you, and when you are done with it, they will take it back.
If this well regulated militia is no longer necessary for the survival of the free State, then it is reasonable that the right to keep and bear arms can and should be infringed.
I realize that plenty of people disagree with me, and if you are one of them, I won’t hold it against you. More significantly, six people who disagree with me sit on the Supreme Court.
These justices are originalists. They look back on our history and traditions and seek to find the original intent of the authors of our Constitution and our earliest laws. These justices like to look back on the year 1791, when the difference between a military weapon and a hunting rifle was negligible. If I were a lawyer about to argue for an assault weapons ban before these justices, I would hire a historian, and I would point that individual at the great, great grandfather of the AR-15, the Gatling gun.
The Gatling gun, one of the earliest machine guns, was not a hand-held weapon. It was mounted either to a wagon or a ship, and it took four men to operate it. In 1886, it was capable of firing 400 rounds per minute.
If I were preparing a history lesson for the Supreme Court, I would want to know what was the original intent of this weapon, based on company marketing materials and the letters and diaries of its inventor, Richard Gatling. I would look for federal, local or even military regulations restricting the use of Gatling guns in crowded, urban areas. Were there any restrictions keeping citizens from owning this weapon of war? Or, was it simply understood that this weapon was the domain of our armed forces?
I would look, in short, through our traditions and history to find distinctions between citizens' guns, protected by the Second Amendment, and weapons of war. I would apply what I found to create reasonable regulations on other weapons, like the AR-15.
No comments have been added yet.
