David Michael Miller
It’s time for those of us who are tired of gun violence to stop being reasonable.
The other side sure as heck isn’t and they’ve been incredibly successful. The National Rifle Association, its followers and groups that are even more extreme (as if that were possible), have doggedly pursued two strategies: oppose even the smallest and most reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, while pushing for ever more liberal gun laws.
The most disgusting of their moves came in the wake of Newtown, where 20 little kids and six of their teachers were gunned down in their classrooms. Then Vice-President Joe Biden convened a work group, which developed a few modest and sensible reforms. But they were cut down by the NRA, which essentially spit in the eyes of grieving families.
Newtown represented the NRA’s defensive strategy at its most extreme: oppose even the most mild of reforms even in the face of the most deplorable gun massacres. And now the offensive (in more ways than one) effort to allow any gun anywhere possessed by almost anyone at any time marches on in Wisconsin. A bill has been introduced in the state Legislature to eliminate even minimal requirements for training in order to carry a concealed weapon. The bill was approved by a Senate committee last week on a party line vote. If this bill fails this session it will only be because some people make a decent living teaching these classes, but it won’t be because a majority of legislators are willing to say that they see it for the insanity that it is.
Now, look, of course we’re not likely to repeal the Second Amendment any time soon and I’m not even sure I’d support a serious attempt to do so if it had a chance. I certainly believe our country would be safer and much better off if the Second Amendment had never existed, but repealing it might threaten other parts of the Bill of Rights, which I do care about.
The reason to talk about repeal is to pull the discussion in the other direction. By being extreme, gun advocates have cowed gun-control advocates into making mild proposals that are portrayed, hysterically, as full-on repeals of gun rights and summarily defeated. We don’t even talk about stronger actions that might really work. A political culture in which repeal of the Second Amendment is on the table is one in which stricter gun safety laws are politically feasible even if actual repeal never happens.
I own two hunting rifles myself and, short of outright repeal of the Second Amendment, here’s what this red-blooded American gun owner and sportsman wants. I want each of my guns to be registered. If I transfer ownership, I want to be required to report that to the government. I want to be required to have a license to own any gun. Before I can get that license I should have a thorough background check to make sure I don’t have a record of crime, domestic abuse, mental illness or drug abuse. I should be tested on my understanding of gun laws and firearms safety. I should pay a significant license fee to cover the costs of this program and I should be required to renew my license every so often, say every five years.
I should be absolutely prohibited from owning any semi-automatic weapon or handgun.
Radical proposals? Not really. This describes the way gun laws work in most of the rest of the civilized world. The United States is an outlier in large part because we are the only country that has a protection for gun ownership baked right into our Constitution. And the result is that about 30,000 people are killed by firearms in America each year compared to a few hundred or less in most European countries.
But even the Second Amendment doesn’t have to be the source of so much mayhem. In fact, for most of our history — and even most of the NRA’s history — the Second Amendment was an afterthought. It’s only in the last few decades when the NRA married the Second Amendment to the culture wars that it has been interpreted in such an extreme and destructive fashion.
Supporters of the bill to eliminate safety training for concealed carry like to refer to such bills as “constitutional carry.” That’s ironic since even the plain language of the Second Amendment doesn’t imply that we’ve been granted a right to carry a gun anywhere without training. In fact, it would seem to imply that we be part of a trained “militia.” But the Constitution does grant the power to interpret what the Second Amendment actually does mean to the Supreme Court. Constitutional carry advocates essentially believe they have rights they don’t have and that the Supreme Court’s interpretations, even as generous as they have been to the NRA, are invalid when the Court sides with any restrictions at all.
In other words, “constitutional carry” is just the latest step in an ever more extreme, radical, dangerous and, frankly, crazy movement. But it’s a movement that has been wildly successful by pulling the debate in their direction. It’s time for some balance on the other side. Let’s start talking about repealing the Second Amendment.
A final note. I wrote and submitted this blog three days before Las Vegas. What prompted it was the state legislation to allow permitless carry in Wisconsin. Then a gunman opened fire on a crowd with automatic or semiautomatic weapons and killed, as of this writing, 58 innocent people and injured hundreds of others. This is what the Second Amendment does.
