Despite a cascade of political conflicts agitating our public discourse, the issue of gun control is showing amazing resilience.
Young people deserve most of the credit. They have not allowed us to forget what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a 19-year-old man with an assault rifle killed 17 people.
Why does the United States experience so much gun violence? A recent analysis in the New York Times asks, is it because American society is unusually turbulent? Or because of our racial divisions, or because we lack proper care for people who are mentally ill?
Comparative studies show that one variable alone explains the high rate of mass shootings in America: the enormous number of guns that are available here. It’s that simple. More guns mean more gun killings.
Whether you compare the U.S. with developed countries, or American states, or American towns and cities, or areas with differing crime rates within these jurisdictions, you find the same thing: where there is more gun ownership, there are more gun killings.
The main reason that regulation of gun ownership in this country has been so difficult is that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the U.S. than they are elsewhere. After a mass shooting in Britain in 1987, the country instituted strict gun-control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting.
The U.S. has repeatedly determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the appalling cost to society. That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what sets the U.S. apart.
Recently, a British journalist put it this way. The tragedy at Sandy Hook in 2012, he wrote, marked the end of the gun-control debate. “Once America decided that killing children was bearable,” he wrote, “the debate was over.”
If we are to reverse that verdict this time, we must confront the gun industry head on. Its lobby is led by the National Rifle Association. The NRA used to be a sensible organization that served the interests of hunters and hobbyists. It has transformed itself into a lobby for gun manufacturers.
To tackle this problem, we must first consider the Second Amendment. We have allowed our opponents to capture the high ground of the Constitution. That is a fatal mistake in American politics.
Here is the text: “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.”
What do these words mean? First, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, they do not declare a new right; they assert that, under the Constitution, a natural right — the right to keep and bear arms — may not be infringed.
Compare the First Amendment. It guarantees the right to free speech, among others. The Constitution does not create that right. It forbids law-making bodies from enacting any statute that abridges that right. Courts in turn must declare any such enactment unconstitutional, null and void.
What about the Second Amendment?
The government of the District of Columbia, to stem gun violence there, adopted an ordinance that banned handguns and required that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns (used, say, for hunting or target practice) be kept in one’s home “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.” A citizen named Dick Heller brought suit challenging the ordinance. He said it violated his rights protected by the Second Amendment.
The decision was written by Justice Antonin Scalia. It declared that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to possess a firearm for a lawful purpose. D.C.’s ban on handguns and the requirement that rifles and shotguns be kept “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock” violated this right.
The most significant part of Justice Scalia’s opinion bears quoting.
“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
First Amendment rights do not allow you to cry “fire!” in a crowded theater. Similarly Second Amendment rights do not forbid a lawmaking body from forbidding you to carry firearms in sensitive places like schools; they may impose conditions of the commercial sale of arms; and they may prohibit the carrying of dangerous or unusual weapons.
In other words, if a political will develops to enact such statutes, the Second Amendment will not prevent it.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who was a dissenter in the Heller case, believes that the Second Amendment must be repealed. The circumstances of the country are so different. Our national defense no longer depends on state-regulated militias.
Our culture is no longer dominated by dispersed rural communities, but by densely settled metropolitan areas. We need, wrote Justice Stevens, to rethink this right in light of vastly different circumstances.
Altering the Constitution is a monumental undertaking. It would be an enormous distraction from the task at hand, which is to enact laws to curb the abuse of firearms. We can do that without repealing the Second Amendment. We do not need to take away anyone’s Second Amendment rights.
Which regulations make common sense? We should:
1. Ban the sale of military-style assault rifles to private persons.
2. Regulate gun shows.
3. Maintain a registry of everyone licensed to own a gun (comparable to lists of those who have a driver’s license).
4. Allow police, after obtaining a court order, to confiscate weapons from dangerous people (the so-called “red-flag” regulation).
A recent march organized by the Parkland students attracted more than 500,000 people to Washington, D.C. Thousands more rallied in state capitals. We must seize this tide.
We must make support for sweeping gun controls a litmus test for Congressional candidates.
Don Robinson, a retired professor of government and American studies at Smith College, is the author of “Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,” which won the Annisfield-Wolf Award in 1972. His column appears on the fourth Thursday of each month, and he can be reached at drobinso@smith.edu.