The Second Amendment: A very knotty problen for us

On April 17, Republican congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio held a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in New York City designed to show that Manhattan’s Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is personally responsible for a huge increase in every type of serious crime in New York City. That he has coddled criminals without exception. And that he has treated the supposedly growing number of victims of terrible crimes shabbily.

Jordan presided over what can only be called a travesty of congressional hearings, during which he and other Republican members of the committee and their hand-picked witnesses spouted outrageous lies about how supposedly dangerous our city is.

I felt similarly bombarded by lies masquerading as God’s truth during a few hours of online research into the history of the Second Amendment, which, as part of the Bill of Rights, was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791. It is worded as follows: “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.”

I read only a tiny portion of the mountains of articles and blogs posted by gun lovers — who include members of the National Rifle Association (five million strong as of December 2018, according to its website) — and many members of Congress, nearly all of them Republicans who receive large donations from the NRA and lobbyists for gun and ammunition manufacturers.

Gun lovers assert that the Second Amendment gives virtually everybody a sacred right to own as many guns and kinds of guns as they want. Their arguments include their insistence that the first clause in the amendment is only one explanation among many for why each citizen has the right to bear arms, and is not a necessary condition. The current Supreme Court, too, has ruled that that introductory clause should be ignored.

Many gun lovers maintain that the word “militia” referred to all males — although not Native Americans or African-Americans) — whether they had served or were serving in a militia. They reject arguments about the weapons the Founding Fathers had in mind — muskets, which shot only one lead ball at a time and took a minute to reload — on the grounds that that is beside the point, because if the Founding Fathers wanted the amendments to refer only to what existed at that time, the First Amendment could not encompass the telegraph, publications printed with modern equipment, the internet, and so on.

I read only a tiny portion of the mountains of evidence cited by proponents of gun control showing that the first part of the Second Amendment must be accepted as an inherent, integral part of it. For example, Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2021 in Young v. State of Hawaii, “Our review of more than 700 years of English and American legal history reveals a strong theme: Government has the power to regulate arms in the public square. History is messy and, as we anticipated, the record is not uniform. But the overwhelming evidence from the states’ constitutions and statutes, the cases, and the commentaries confirms that we have never assumed that individuals have an unfettered right to carry weapons in public spaces. Indeed, we can find no general right to carry arms into the public square for self defense.”

Warren Burger, the U.S. Supreme Court’s chief justice from 1969 until 1986, wrote for the Associated Press in 1991, “The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires. In referring to ‘a well-regulated militia,’ the Framers clearly intended to secure the right to bear arms essentially for military purposes.”

Burger stated in an interview on NPR in 1991 that the 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.”

Just as people have cited the Bible as grounds for all kinds of cruelties, gun lovers interpret the Constitution to suit themselves to a T. For every 100 people in the United States, there are an estimated 120 guns. And what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in the United States among children and teenagers in 2020.

It seems glaringly obvious to me that, given the series of pro-gun rulings of the right-wing justices who now constitute a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the manufacture, purchase, and ownership of guns of all makes and models will continue to proliferate in the United States — and cause thousands of needless deaths — until liberals again constitute a majority on the court.