Forgive me if I take a holiday from some of the liberal and progressive hysteria over the Supreme Court's ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own a firearm. But, then, I am a Westerner and a gun owner.
The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government and specifying some of the rights of individuals (indeed, some of the Framers opposed the Bill of Rights because they feared individual rights would be seen as limited to those amendments). If the Framers intended to discuss state militias, the Bill of Rights seems an odd place to do it. It's meaningful that the amendment is No. 2 behind that wellspring of recognizing individual rights, the First Amendment. One could see how the Framers said, the people have these rights, and here's how will they be ensured of protecting them.
Remember, these men rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world, and many believed the people should always have the unalienable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government or leave a voluntary union of sovereign states. The Whiskey Rebellion and, most cataclysmically, the Civil War, settled some of those issues. Others were left to the courts.
Yet the ambiguity of the amendment has long been contested. And extreme measures on both sides brought matters to a head, and make the future even more contentious.
Cities and states have turned to gun control laws as society has become more violent. In the District of Columbia's case, it was a total ban, which led to the case. Some regulation is right and proper. No right can be absolute in a functioning republic (not even the right to property, my conservative friends). The right to free speech doesn't extend to shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, in Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s memorable words.
On the other hand, gun violence has complex wellsprings -- and it's interesting that people who normally do well with the complicated and nuanced get so absolute when guns come up. It's unclear that complete bans alone will work, and they may well, as the Court ruled, run up against the Second Amendment. To the left: Don't ask, if you fear the answer. If you don't like it, repeal it. But most Americans are comfortable with lawful gun ownership.
The biggest problem is the evolution of the National Rifle Association (of which I was once a member, and where I took a safe firearms class in seventh grade) from an organization of hunters and target shooters into a powerful, extremist pressure group. Its handiwork is seen especially at the state level, funding efforts to repeal laws that, say, ban guns from bars. Extremism is always bad for a democracy, and in this case the Court has opened the door for the NRA to go for broke (cliches, hey it's Friday).
A second problem attends the left, in going overboard about how awful guns are and how weird and perverted it is to even have guns. This is how elections are lost. I'm convinced Al Gore would have incontestably won in 2000 if he had robustly defended lawful gun ownership. So far, Obama has smartly done just that. But the liberal blogosphere and Air America risk alienating more moderates than they realize by sounding like an anti-matter version of the NRA.
Justice Scalia's opinion would have been fine in an America of moderation and compromise; an America where drugs, gangs, family breakdown, rotten inner-city schools and lack of jobs didn't fuel gun violence; an America where brutal video games and movies were offset by the teaching and upholding of standards; an America where the common good had not been run over by venal, violent individualism. But it comes in this America. So, lock and load...litigiously speaking, of course.
I also point you to Todd's on-point comment below. Any disgruntled Hillary supporters or moderate (read, Goldwater) Republicans thinking of voting for McCain should remember the stakes for the Supreme Court.
I wish we could depend on the same Justices to defend both 2nd amendment rights and also little things like Habeas Corpus. Luckily there are people on both left and right who do both, but they get shut out of much mainstream media because they complicate the ridiculous binary political view they rely on to keep things simple for themselves.
Posted by: todd | June 27, 2008 at 11:03 AM
You might call the NRA "extreme" but if they had been left alone to do their huntin' shootin' fishin' in peace they would never have felt the need to become an overt political force. What they are asking for is respect and they move to whatever political position is necessary to achieve that respect.
On a somewhat related issue, I can't help thinking about the ongoing elections in Zimbabwe without wondering how that country would be different if the majority of the population owned rifles. You can call the NRA extreme if you like, but there are worse things in this world and a government turning against its own people is one of them.
Posted by: Tel | June 27, 2008 at 05:00 PM
Holmes set up a straw man with his "fire" analogy; the case he was commenting on was the right of women and men to -merely- speak against a military draft in World War One.
In no way was that analogous to "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater."
His gung-ho jingoism dealt a serious blow to free political speech in America.
Posted by: kb | June 28, 2008 at 07:54 PM