So we don't think the right to bear arms is absolute, but we can't agree on to what extent it shouldn't be absolute. But let's pretend for a moment that we could. Let's say we all agreed that X kinds of guns were good and Y kinds of weapons were bad, and so Y weapons didn't fall under the banner of the 2nd Amendment. That should mean that the right to own any weapon X is sacrosanct.
Unless it isn't. Dick's and Wal-Mart, seeing that the government seemed unlikely to move to change the law soon, have decided on their own to take two steps: to stop selling "assault" weapons (the AR-15), and to stop selling guns to anyone under the age of twenty-one. The pro-gun crowd hates the move, while gun-control advocates think it's responsible corporate citizenship.
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| Fortunately, nobody has yet tried to restrict the type of guns I use. |
I'm not really either pro-gun or anti-gun. I'm anti-Second Amendment. I think we need to tear it up and rewrite it in a modern idiom so we have some idea what the hell it means and what its limits are meant to be. I think any type of gun control violates the Second Amendment as it's written (i.e., "shall not be infringed upon"). I also think that's an insane way to interpret the rule if you expect a government to have legitimacy, which is why we all have applied limits to it, even though those limits are not written in the Constitution. We are all in open rebellion against the letter of the law here.
However, if we are going to accept that some kinds of weapons fall under the absolute right to keep and bear, then those should apply to anyone who is a citizen. Restricting them from people of a certain age who would otherwise have such a right in the name of safety is to say the right is meaningless. It's nullification, one of the oldest forms of activism outside the law.
This is the same argument that comes up with alcohol. When I was 19, I was old enough for my country to put me in front of drill instructors who knocked me around when I did something wrong, but I wasn't old enough to drink (not that I would have back then, but still). Younger people are discriminated against in insurance rates because as a group they are statistically riskier drivers, but it is illegal to do the same thing to old people with health insurance, although they by far are the heaviest users, driving up the cost of insurance for everyone else. We mock the young for their indifference, but the moment they are of age in America, they face a de jure discrimination that makes them second-class, or at least probationary, citizens. No wonder they come into our democracy a little bit jaded.
Still, you could argue that the right to buy liquor or the right to pay the same insurance rates as everyone else until you yourself have caused an accident are not guaranteed in the Constitution. The right to a gun--whatever we decide that means--is.
I realize that just because some stores won't sell guns to young people doesn't mean they can't get them at all. This isn't a legal decision, it's a corporate one. But would we accept it if Wal-Mart said they wouldn't sell guns to older people, because their shaky nerves and lack of coordination made them unsafe shooters? Or if car dealers didn't sell to senior citizens because we all know none of them can drive? Of course not.
This is an attempt to made our terrible law less terrible without actually doing the hard work of changing it by taking it out of the hides of the young. What it leaves us with is a country in which we can keep a person from buying a shotgun in America so he doesn't shoot his classmates, but we give him an M-16 in another country and allow him to point it where he thinks is right.
1. The Supreme Court has told and will continue to tell us what the 2nd Amendment means. Just read some of the rulings. And consider reading rulings on the 1st Amendment. Or on any amendment.... Or on any part of the Constitution.
ReplyDelete2. regulated does not mean the same thing in the 18th century that it means in the 21st.
The interpretations of courts on the 2nd Amendment often leave as much up to interpretation as the amendment itself. Here's an opinion from one Supreme Court justice from DC v Heller, in which he summarizes many other decisions from the court:
Delete"There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment's right of free speech was not. Thus, we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for *any* sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose.
...Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should 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."
So there are limits on the Second Amendment. What are those limits? That's the argument society is having right now, because the court doesn't give us easy rules. I'd argue that removing the right of an adult to arm oneself merely on the basis of age is unconstitutional. But we'll see.
The author of that passage, interestingly, was Scalia.
heller does get mentioned a lot lately. it was a bit of a watershed. anyway, if you read that full opinion, you see that he does articulate limits. indeed, he names some in your quotation. but, yes, there are limits. only naive and uninformed people who read the amendment and think that that's the end of it contemplate it as limitless, just as the average layman typically has little understanding of what the first amendment means or what the constitution means.
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