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July 01, 2008
2nd Amendment ascendant
As GFWs* wail, gnash their teeth and screech in outrage over the Supreme Court's decision declaring an individual, Constitutional right to possess firearms, Steve Chapman asks the key question: How did gun control lose?
It looked as though ever-stricter gun control was the wave of the future. But the future had different ideas. What happened? Three main things:
• Gun control didn't work. In the 1990s, despite its draconian ban, Washington became the murder capital of the United States. Chicago's homicide rate, which had been declining in the years before it banned handguns, climbed over the following decade.
During the time the federal assault weapons law was in effect, the number of gun murders declined—but so did murders involving knives and other weapons. When the law was allowed to expire in 2004, something interesting happened to the national murder rate: nothing.
• Laws allowing concealed weapons proliferated—with no ill effects. In 1987, Florida gained national attention—and notoriety—by passing a law allowing citizens to get permits to carry concealed handguns. Opponents predicted a wave of carnage by pistol-packing hotheads, but it didn't happen. In fact, murders and other violent crimes subsided. Permit holders proved to be sober and restrained.
People elsewhere took heed, and today, according to the NRA, 40 states have "right-to-carry" laws. As those laws have spread, the homicide rate has fallen sharply from the peak reached in 1991.
• The 2nd Amendment got a second look. In 1983, a San Francisco lawyer named Don Kates published an article in the University of Michigan Law Review arguing that, contrary to prevailing wisdom in the judiciary and law schools, the Constitution upholds an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Numerous legal scholars, spurred to examine the record, reached the same surprising conclusion. Before long, even some liberal law professors were coming around.
In 2000, Harvard's Laurence Tribe published a new edition of his influential constitutional law textbook, asserting that the 2nd Amendment had an undeniable meaning: "The federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes . . . "
Of course, I prefer a simpler explanation, one that is true to Occam's Razor:
The plain text of the Second Amendment secures and safeguards a preexisting right of the People to self defense; that the Bill of Rights was designed to protect the People from governmental tyranny; and that it requires Olympic-class mental gymnastics and intellectual dishonesty of Herculean proportions to argue that the Second Amendment was intended to protect the right of the government to control and disarm the People, to render the same People -- who are the beneficiaries of the protections enumerated in the rest of the Bill of Rights -- supplicants and subjects of the government in the Second Amendment.
*Gun Fearing Wussies, courtesy of Kim Du Toit.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 1, 2008 07:38 AM
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