Lepore begins with the stark imagery of a a recent school shooting in Ohio, in which a boy named T.J. Lane shot several of his fellow students:
Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.
You'll notice that this shooting rampage took place the day after Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman. Lepore also closes the article with a detailed, heartwrenching depiction of yet another shooting spree, at Oikos University in Oakland on April 2nd:
[A] forty-three-year-old man named One Goh walked into Oikos University, a small Christian college. He was carrying a .45-calibre semiautomatic pistol and four magazines of ammunition. He grabbed Katleen Ping, a receptionist, and dragged her into a classroom. Nearby, Lucas Garcia, a thirty-three-year-old E.S.L. teacher, heard a voice call out, “Somebody’s got a gun!” He helped his students escape through a back door. Dechen Yangdon, twenty-seven, turned off the lights in her classroom and locked the door. She could hear Ping screaming, “Help, help, help!” “We were locked inside,” Yangdon said later. “We couldn’t help her.”
Goh ordered the students to line up against the wall. He said, “I’m going to kill you all.”
They had come from all over the world. Ping, twenty-four, was born in the Philippines. She was working at the school to support her parents, her brother, two younger sisters, and her four-year-old son, Kayzzer. Her husband was hoping to move to the United States. Tshering Rinzing Bhutia, thirty-eight, was born in Gyalshing, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He took classes during the day; at night, he worked as a janitor at San Francisco International Airport. Lydia Sim, twenty-one, was born in San Francisco, to Korean parents; she wanted to become a pediatrician. Sonam Choedon, thirty-three, belonged to a family living in exile from Tibet. A Buddhist, she came to the United States from Dharamsala, India. She was studying to become a nurse. Grace Eunhea Kim, twenty-three, was putting herself through school by working as a waitress. Judith Seymour was fifty-three. Her parents had moved back to their native Guyana; her two children were grown. She was about to graduate. Doris Chibuko, forty, was born in Enugu, in eastern Nigeria, where she practiced law. She immigrated in 2002. Her husband, Efanye, works as a technician for A.T. & T. They had three children, ages eight, five, and three. She was two months short of completing a degree in nursing.
Ping, Bhutia, Sim, Choedon, Kim, Seymour, and Chibuko: Goh shot and killed them all. Then he went from one classroom to another, shooting, before stealing a car and driving away.
This is what happens when our gun control laws fail, these are the stakes of this debate: three high school kids dead and two severely wounded in Ohio, seven ESL students trying to establish themselves in a new country murdered in cold blood, and one boy unaccountably murdered in Florida for no reason other than looking suspicious. Something has gone horribly wrong here, and it's our job, as citizens of this country, to figure out how to fix it.
So, perhaps we should look at the laws that enable crimes like these to happen. One thing that has consistently bothered me in the decade that I've been paying attention to this issue, as a student of history and a proud patriot, is that the actual text of the 2nd Amendment is largely ignored. In full, it states:
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."
Everyone can rattle off the second half of the text, but it's plainly obvious that the first half is the most important. It gives the justification for the existence of the Amendment in the first place, its raison d'être: Militias are necessary for the protection of the state's freedom, so people should have weapons available to them. It says that the reason for people to keep and carry guns is to defend the country's freedom, not for personal protection or any reason commonly given today.
Lepore points out that the original version of the Amendment makes this point more explicitly:
The U.S. Constitution, which was signed in Philadelphia in September of 1787, granted Congress the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions,” the power “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress,” and the power “to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
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In Madison’s original version, the amendment read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” This provision was made in the same spirit as the Third Amendment, which forbids the government to force you to have troops billeted in your home: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
And before the concern is even raised, the Second Amendment wasn't seen as regulating hunting weapons at the time. The Second Amendment--specifically the "bear arms" phrase--has to do with people using guns against other people:
None of this had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own and use them; the Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Garry Wills once wrote, “One does not bear arms against a rabbit.”
But, anyone who knows this country's history also knows that militias have never really played a big role in the state's security. Indeed, Militias haven't really served any role in American history since the 18th century, and they have been totally non-existent at least since the Civil War. (Also, note the inclusion of another totally outdated Amendment, the 3rd, which states that no soldiers can be stationed in a private residence without the consent of the property owner. Just imagine how orwellian Scalia would get with it: "Soldiers can, and indeed must, be quartered within any and every private house with our without a pressing need or any owner's consent.")
What's really important to understand, though, is this: For the first 200 years of this country's history, the Second Amendment was interpreted similarly to how I've just described it--even by the one body most responsible for the recent deregulation of gun laws, the National Rifle Association:
The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.
In the 1960s, there were several high profile shootings: John F. Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior both in 1968. in 1966, Charles Whitman went on a shooting rampage at the University of Texas in Austin and shot and killed 15 people. Lepore notes that even as movement conservatism was beginning to take form in that decade, the NRA still supported the gun restrictions that came about as a result of these killings, notably the 1968 Gun Control Act.
So where did things go wrong? Movement conservatism reared its ugly head and started dismantling our society:
In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense. Fights over rights are effective at getting out the vote. Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked. Opposing gun control was also consistent with a larger anti-regulation, libertarian, and anti-government conservative agenda. In 1975, the N.R.A. created a lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, headed by Harlon Bronson Carter, an award-winning marksman and a former chief of the U.S. Border Control. But then the N.R.A.’s leadership decided to back out of politics and move the organization’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where a new recreational-shooting facility was to be built. Eighty members of the N.R.A.’s staff, including Carter, were ousted. In 1977, the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, usually held in Washington, was moved to Cincinnati, in protest of the city’s recent gun-control laws. Conservatives within the organization, led by Carter, staged what has come to be called the Cincinnati Revolt. The bylaws were rewritten and the old guard was pushed out. Instead of moving to Colorado, the N.R.A. stayed in D.C., where a new motto was displayed: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”
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In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “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.”
The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely.
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Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states.
It's really important to read this pages-long examination of the history of movement conservatism's effects on our country's gun control regulations, so please do so. The salient point is that this is new, this gun-rights-at-all-costs mentality that seems to have invaded even the Democratic Party. For the first two hundred years that this country existed, the clear language of the Second Amendment was self-evident. But, with the rise of Goldwater, Buckley, and their movement conservative ilk came a new, factually incorrect, deliberate misunderstanding of the Second Amendment that has now become the norm. Now we have laws that allow people to carry concealed handguns on them almost anywhere depending on the state; laws that allow people to own assault weapons; laws that allow people to legally shoot and kill other people if they feel threatened.
I think the most important paragraph in this piece, and the one that I believe has the power to change the debate on gun control if its sentiment is seized on by progressives is this one:
One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
This is not how we should live. When we begin to think of the carrying a hidden firearm on us as something honorable and just, then something has gone terribly wrong with our society. The idea that gun violence, like one of the school shootings depicted at the beginning and end of Lepore's article, can be solved by more gun violence is absurd and morally wrong. Actually think about this: if the faculty at those schools had actually had weapons for their own "defense," would they have shot the students before they had started their shooting rampages? Of course not. The only result of arming everyone at those schools would have been more shooting. That is not an admirable goal, and it would only make the situation worse; it is, again, absurd and morally wrong.
What would happen in the converse situation, if guns were unavailable to the public or much harder for the average person to get, is axiomatic. The type of killings Lepore's article depicts would simply be less common. If T.J. Lane's uncle hadn't been able to purchase a gun, he wouldn't have had a gun available to him to shoot his classmates. If Goh hadn't had a gun, he couldn't have shot all of those people. If George Zimmerman hadn't had a gun with him when he began stalking Trayvon Martin that night in February, he wouldn't have been able to shoot the teenager. Again, this isn't something that can be debated. Sure, these murderers all possibly could have bought their weapons on the black market--making handgun ownership illegal wouldn't get rid of guns, but it would make it much much harder to buy them--but it's ridiculous to assume that a disturbed teenager or a paranoid neighborhood watchman would have been able or willing to go through whatever shady process would be required.
The freedom to carry a concealed gun, not to mention the freedom to shoot another person without any form of accountability, is necessarily an endorsement of violence, or someone shooting another person. That we allow people to walk around hiding deadly weapons on them only so they can feel more safe is sad, and society should be trying to remedy the issues that cause people to feel so insecure that they must have a gun hidden on them at all times, not encouraging them to arm themselves against perceived or potential, but highly unlikely, threats. This is wrong. This is not how we should live.
I'll close this already too-long blog post with an image from Jill Lepore. In the middle of the essay, she goes to a shooting range to see what it's like to fire a gun, a .22 caliber. Afterward, she goes to the restroom to wash the gun powder off of her hands, and pauses, standing at the sink, thinking off all of the violence of late.
I opened the door, and turned on the tap. T. J. Lane had used a .22-calibre Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. For a long time, I let the water run.
This article does a nice job of providing some (much needed) historical perspective on the debate regarding the interpretation of the second amendment...interesting isn't it, how conservatives make a 'liberal' interpretation of it.
ReplyDeleteSo, I would like to know more regarding "what were the vested interests" behind the shift at the NRA. My guesses are that a gun manufacturer wanted to sell more guns or there was a 'political policy shift' that stoked fear.
More journalists should dig deeper into this -- thanks for the provocative essay.