By Michael Califra
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.
On December 15, 1791, the Second Amendment was adopted along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. But is it as relevant and necessary in the 21st Century as it was in the 18th?
For the Founding Fathers, the right to bear arms was deeply ingrained; formed by a philosophy dating back at least to 16th Century Florence and the political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. For Machiavelli, a leader’s authority was derived exclusively from the supremacy of coercive power. Whether a ruler was a force for good or evil, his government beloved or hated, was irrelevant in Machiavelli’s view. In the brutal world of politics, a state and its laws would never be generally accepted if they were not supported by a show of force which compelled obedience and rendered opposition useless.
Yet despite Machiavelli’s thoughts on how to get and keep political power – or perhaps because of them – he was deeply distrustful of those who had it, and saw the standing armies used to coerce the citizenry to obedience as the root of tyranny. To protect the citizenry from abuse by the powerful he advocated giving them a power center of their own – the citizens’ militia.
Machiavelli reasoned that concept of an armed citizen warrior would be the bulwark against corrupt governance. His writings on the subject affected political thinkers for centuries and their concepts would be included in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Articles of Confederation, and finally in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the new American republic.
A militia made up of ordinarily citizens necessitated the right of the people to keep and bear arms. When James Madison and his colleagues, charged with drafting the Bill of Rights, wrote the Second Amendment, they included in it two rights: the right of the individual to keep and bear arms, and the right of each of the states to form their own militia. Yet the Amendment is awkwardly worded and its intent has long been the subject of controversy.
There is little dispute that its purpose was to ensure that the people could resist a foreign invasion or the central government should it ever devolve into tyranny. But there is little agreement about whether that resistance should involve only the “well-regulated militia” or armed citizens acting on their own.
In any case, the Second Amendment is an anachronism today. The nation and its institutions, if imperfect and slow to correct historic injustices, have proven fundamentally sound for more than two centuries. Having survived a Civil War, our constitution is the world’s longest-serving written charter of government. The United States has a massive defense establishment with global reach that is without question the most powerful on Earth. When the nation’s citizens are call upon to protect it, it is not through citizens’ militias, but in branches of the military and their reserve units, which now rank among our most respected institutions. It now seems the height of absurdity to imagine armed citizens committing an act of treason by attempting to violently overthrow a government they themselves elected, no matter how frustrated or angry they may be.
So what, then, is the rational for the Second Amendment in modern society? Simply stated, there is none. So why not repeal it? After all, the Constitution once has an 18th Amendment which was repealed for no reason other than people getting sick and tired of not being able to buy a beer. The truth is that today, the high bar for amending the Constitution makes repeal of the Second Amendment politically impossible. So it stays with us, having wrought consequences the Founders could never have envisioned two centuries ago.
The United States of America in the 21st Century is an unusually violent country that averages 11,000 gun murders a year. The nation is awash in firearms, including military assault weapons that are legally available to anyone including criminals, the mentally unbalanced and even people whose names appear on the government’s Terrorist Watch List. We’ve suffered a long and growing list of horrific mass murders with names like Virginia Tech, Columbine and most recently Aurora, Colorado and Oak Creek, Wisconsin, which now occur with shocking regularity. Every single day, dozens of other gun deaths, including those of innocent children, occur all over this country in tragic incidents invisible to most Americans. And while personal safety can never be guaranteed, no one is ever safe in a country where anyone and anyplace is a potential target by a person with a gripe and a powerful weapon of mass destruction bought for cash or on a credit card with no questions asked.
There are, of course, sensible measures that can be taken to begin to change this reality that don’t involve amending the Constitution: reinstating the Clinton-era ban on military assault rifles, which the Bush Administration let expire; closing the so called “gun show loophole”, which lets unlicensed gun dealers sell any weapon to anyone, without running a background check; banning high-capacity magazines to reduce the amount of killing someone could do before being forced to stop and reload; all are relatively minor regulations that would make us safer. Unfortunately, none of them will be enacted because our politicians are too compliant with the wishes of the gun lobby. Chief among them is the National Rifle Association, which claims to represent the interest of gun owners but is, in fact, a lobby for the domestic and foreign gun manufacturers. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the NRA has received at least $14.8 million dollars over the last few years from dozens of gun makers, all of which have benefited from the NRA’s lobbying efforts. And the NRA serves the interests of those gun makers well; having secured passage of a federal law that limits liability claims against gun manufacturers and successfully resisting any real restrictions on gun ownership. And that’s despite the fact that their own membership overwhelmingly supports some restrictions on guns. According to an opinion survey released in July by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, 79 percent of current and former NRA members and 80 percent of the other gun owners supported requiring gun retailers to perform background checks on all employees to ensure they are not felons. More than two-thirds of both groups said that permits to carry concealed weapons should not be allowed for people who had committed violent misdemeanors, such as assault, or those who have been arrested for domestic violence.
But while paying lip service to the idea of background checks, the NRA, perhaps the most powerful special interest lobby in Washington, fights relentlessly against them with a near pathological vengeance, as they do any restrictions on guns. With revenues of $200 million a year the lobby spends millions of dollars – $7.2 million in the 2010 election cycle and certainly much more this year – supporting candidates who toe their line while whipping up anti-gun control hysteria to defeat those who support even mild restrictions on guns. Politicians, including President Obama, are targeted for defeat by the NRA even though they have taken no action in support of new gun legislation; their only sin was to have supported such legislation sometime in the past.
The NRA’s favorite meme is: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. The truth is that people with guns kill people, and people with military assault weapons, like the one used by James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, kill a lot of people, and quickly, before anyone has a chance to stop them. Their strained reasoning: that the way to make our communities safe is to put more guns in the hands of more people is a sick, self-serving delusion. Would a pitched gun battle in the dark, smoke-filled movie theater in Aurora really have resulted in less killing? And what if the police had charged in – how would they have known whom to take aim at with multiple guns firing? When Congresswoman Gabriele Giffords was shot in 2011, Joe Zamudio, a legally-armed citizen, went to the scene as it was unfolding and took aim at a man he saw holding a gun. But that man wasn’t the shooter; he had wrested the gun away from the shooter. The tragedy was a split second from claiming yet another innocent victim, which had already killed six people including a federal judge, a nine year- old girl, and left 13 others were wounded.
According to the NRA, any restrictions on guns are constitutionally inconsistent with the Second Amendment’s “shall not be infringed” wording. But is it? While gun control laws have had a mixed history before the Supreme Court with some being upheld while others have been stuck down, an analogy can be made with the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech; yet freedom of speech is not absolute in this country. In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Schenck v. United States, declared that there are limits to speech such as shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. The risks to public safety from someone falsely shouting “fire” was deemed greater than the right to express oneself, and no reasonable person would disagree. Recently, in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Justice Antonin Scalia, probably the most conservative of the “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court, said of certain types of firearms, “Yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed.” When public safety is at stake, sensible exceptions are made. Yet, when it comes to guns, the NRA is determined to use all its political clout and financial resources to see it to it that our political system is no longer willing to make those exceptions, even in the name of public safety. And they’ve been absolutely successful for nearly 20 years.
There are exceptions; some of our politicians have shown political courage on the issue of guns. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy of Long Island, who lost her husband when a gunman opened fire on a Long Island Railroad train in 1993 (six people were killed in that rampage and 19 injured including McCarthy’s son) have introduced legislation that would require all ammunition dealers to be licensed and maintain records, including reporting the sale of more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition. The bill also requires buyers to show photo IDs when purchasing ammunition. Lautenberg and McCarthy say these simple rules would effectively ban the online and mail-order purchase of ammunition. James Holmes was able to purchase 6,000 rounds of ammunition online before his rampage in Aurora.
What are the chances that any of this will actually become law? Zero. The leaderships of both parties have made clear they have no intention of considering new gun control legislation. NRA has already used its muscle to kill even those modest proposals.
The gun zealots of the NRA say none of this would make a difference anyway; that someone intent on doing damage with a firearm will find a way to get one no matter what laws are in place. While no one is so naïve as to think gun control laws, no matter how stringent, can stop all gun violence or make it impossible for someone to get a weapon if they are determined to do so, a study done last year by economist and urban studies theorist Richard Florida showed that deaths from firearms are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation; even when those laws include just three simple elements: an assault weapons ban; a requirement for trigger locks, and a mandated safe-storage requirement for gun owners. But the NRA has fought fanatically and successfully against even those simple measures.
Yet it is important to remember that there is one thing more powerful than the NRA in Washington: the collective voices of ordinary Americans. Politicians will always be susceptible to pressure from special interests until “we the people” make it clear that a particular special interest is no longer operating in our public interest and we expect our elected representatives to push back. The NRA’s stranglehold on our government will never dissolve on its own, no matter how many innocent people are gunned down. It will only be broken if we make our voices heard in Washington by getting involved; by organizing; by calling, emailing and writing to our elected representatives to tell them the time has finally come to stop the senseless killing and to assure them of our support when they act in our interest on guns.
The NRA constantly evokes the language of freedom. On their Web site, in their literature, and in the speeches by their officials, personal freedom is equated exclusively with the freedom of anyone to buy any weapon and carry it anywhere they so choose. This country was indeed founded on the principle that everyone is endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Yet the Americans killed in Aurora, Oak Creek, and others gunned down every day in this country have had those rights invalidated by the gun lobby and its intransigence on sensible gun laws. They have been denied the most fundamental rights of life and the pursuit of their personal happiness. They and every other American have been denied a basic liberty in the simple expectation of safety in a public place while doing something as mundane as watching a movie without being gunned down by a madman or a thug because of the easy access to guns. Former NRA President Harlon Carter once made a callous remark dismissive of the lives of the innocent Americans killed by gun violence when he called their deaths simply the “price of freedom.” It is up to us as citizens to decide whether that’s a price we want to continue paying.