Pursuing gun control legislation has become a theme of the political Left while the political Right continues to resist. This issue is a good example of the difference between the two sides of the political spectrum in the United States regarding their understanding of the Constitution.
The pursuit by the Left of yet more gun control than the country already has and does not enforce heightens every time there is a mass shooting. Such shootings are a problem, but the confidence that yet more legislation will solve it is questionable. With most mass shootings, if government agencies had followed existing legislation, the shootings would not have taken place. The failure of government personnel to follow its own rules is a good example of why the political Right has much less confidence than the Left in government.
I offer some reasons that the political Right is correct in its defense of the Second Amendment and the gun rights of its citizens. Here is another place where there is a sharp divide between the political Left and Right.
First, government cannot solve this problem with better laws or enforcement. The problem in controlling crime is not weapons, but criminals. Many criminals have knives as their weapon of choice. Everyone agrees that the identity of the person who wants a gun is important. Society does not want the wrong people to own guns legally. Felons should not possess guns under any circumstances. Prison, which has weight rooms that undoubtedly help reduce stress, but needs to emphasize education and skill training. Prison needs to cease being a training ground for making the criminally inclined even more so.
An example of the failure of extreme gun control is when the Council of the District of Columbia enacted the toughest gun control law in the nation in 1976, the city fathers -- according to what they said at the time -- believed they were making our nation's capital a safer place. The measure failed miserably. Since passage, the murder rate in the DC has skyrocketed by more than 200 percent.
The point is that controlling guns will not solve an issue that relates to the nature of the criminal. Even if one confiscated all guns, the criminally inclined would find other instruments of violence.
Second, regarding the constitution, citizens of America have the constitutional right to possess guns. This is consistent with Switzerland, where every individual owns a gun as part of the national defense system. The right is a political right, in that it ensures citizens the possession of force against a government that steps over its boundaries. It is a self-defense right, for law abiding citizens who know how to do so need to be able to protect themselves from those who have no intention of abiding by the law and perpetrate violence upon their fellow citizens.
Some constitutional scholars and judicial rulings argue that the federal government can disregard several restraints that the Bill of Rights puts on government if the worthiness -- as academics or judges assess that -- of government's purposes justifies ignoring those restraints. Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law and political science at Duke University, argued in The Washington Post that even if the traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment is correct in interpreting it as creating an individual right to gun ownership, the D.C. law mentioned above should still be constitutional because the city had a defensible intent (reducing violence) when it annihilated that right.
Here is a straightforward way of interpreting what the constitution says.
In 1989, Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas Law School had written in a Yale Law Journal article, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," that the amendment's language, properly read, is an embarrassment to those who favor whittling away the amendment's protection of the individuals' right to own guns. He noted that if James Madison, the foremost shaper of the Constitution, and his colleagues in the First Congress intended the Second Amendment to protect only the states' rights to maintain militias, the amendment could have simply said: "Congress shall have no power to prohibit state militias." Or as Virginia's George Mason, who opposed ratification of the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights, said, "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people." Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison accurately points out that the Framers never intended that the word "Militia" meant that the right to keep and bear arms was some kind of "collective" right that applied only to a particular group. If that had been their purpose, they would have been satisfied with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution that gives Congress the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." To ensure that posterity would recognize firearms possession as an "individual right," the Framers included it as part of the Bill of Rights -- an enumeration of every citizen's personal entitlement: free speech, freedom of religion, and a fair trial. The precise location of those famous words -- "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" -- provides convincing evidence for the Founders' vision. When Madison and others fashioned the Bill of Rights, they did not merely constitutionalize -- make fundamental -- the right to bear arms. They made the Second Amendment second only to the First, which protects the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and worship. They did that because individual dignity and self-respect, which are essential to self-government, are related to a readiness for self-defense -- the public's involvement in public safety. Indeed, 150 years ago this month, in the Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney said that one proof that blacks could not be citizens was the fact that the Founders did not envision them having the same rights that whites have, including the right to "keep and carry arms."
The right thing to do on the part of the political Left would be to pursue gun control by changing the Constitution. Seeking to circumvent the Constitution shows the view the political Left has of the Constitution. It is an obstacle they want to remove so that they can pursue continued expansion of the federal government to solve its perception of problems the country faces. For the political Right, the Constitution is the primary way citizens keep the federal government within its sphere, doing what only it can do, and leaving other matters to states, localities, and the people.
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