"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."
Anyone, including certain judges and
justices who have denigrated their calling, who actually thinks that the intent
of the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects or enables an individual
to acquire, carry and use a gun is just wrong; this is not a matter of opinion,
it is the absolute truth. It is far beyond time that we in the United States
allow special interests (ahem, the NRA) and unsophisticated gun lovers to
browbeat the legislative process into submission to their absolutely childish
and cowardly “need” to allow weapons to be held by anyone who so chooses.
Enough already.
And historic precedent wholly supports this
cause, no matter what the special interests would foolishly have us believe the
2nd Amendment means. Former Supreme Court associate justice John
Paul Stevens addresses the issue quite adeptly in his book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution:
For more than 200
years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly
understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways:
First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and
second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose
any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate
the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller,
decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the
possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable
relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”
When I joined the
court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of
the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities.
During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no
judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the
amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might
place any limit on state authority to do anything.
Organizations such
as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a
vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms
severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his
retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger
himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject
of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the
American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”
(Bold emphasis added by this blog author).
Prohibitions on
carrying concealed weapons, or on the possession of firearms by felons and the
mentally ill, and laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places
such as schools and government buildings or imposing conditions and
qualifications on the commercial sale of arms are specifically identified as
permissible regulations.
Thus, Congress’s
failure to enact laws that would expand the use of background checks and limit
the availability of automatic weapons cannot be justified by reference to the
Second Amendment or to anything that the Supreme Court has said about that
amendment.
Unfortunately, the influence of the gun
lobby reminds me of an old Jewish joke about the supremacy of one’s belief vis-à-vis
fact. It used to be available as a tongue-in-cheek logo t-shirt, which read:
Maven University
Opinion above
Knowledge
Sadly, we have allowed this once-witty
aphorism to bully our society into accepting as inevitable such episodes of
tragic violence that are directly related to lack of regulation on the pervasive
availability of guns. This we must change.
Fall in the PAC NW is turning out to be absolutely stunning. Every way you turn, it's as if you're looking at a postcard. And then yesterday, walking through the neighborhood, I noted that Mother Nature had busted out a whole new set of paints. The colors, textures, and vibrancy of each tree, leaf, cloud and even puddle truly popped to my eyes. What an uplifting way to enjoy a Sunday morning. 
