Propose an Amendment or Move On

Alexandra F. B.

First things first: I hate guns. The reasons are long, personal and unimportant in this venue, but I absolutely hate guns. I don’t want to see them, I don’t want to shoot them, I don’t want to be around them, and I won’t live in a home with one. If it were solely up to me, no one would have them. On this, I am unquestionably out of line with my fellow Misfits (except maybe for @LunaticRex’s lovely wife!)

You know who didn’t hate guns, though? The people who wrote and then adopted the Bill of Rights. They didn’t hate guns at all, and in fact viewed them as an important force for liberty against the natural powers of government. They had very good reason for this: tyrants have a propensity to disarm their people as a first step of exerting control over those people. Historically, this went back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which resulted largely from the attempts of Catholic King James II (not LeBron) to disarm the Protestant majority. Since the 1700’s, the pattern has been repeated, and most every great despot has either disarmed his people or aggressively worked to keep them disarmed. All of which is a very brief way of noting that the Second Amendment wasn’t created without forethought, and there is no reason to believe that the concept is not still relevant.

This enumerated right, however, has come under increasing scrutiny in the United States, criticized by gun control advocates who point to our current rates of gun violence as an argument to curb the right. {Never mind that this increased panic and popular attention is wholly removed from actual data that measures deaths, injuries and other forms of violence related to guns…} Those gun control advocates have proposed a whole bunch of reforms including expanded background checks, a reintroduction of the assault weapons ban, liability for gun makers, “smart guns” and, recently, #NoFlyNoBuy, an attempt to use the Federal No Fly list as a means of blocking suspected terrorists from legally purchasing firearms.

Nearly every proposal fits one identical profile: A. Waste. Of. Fucking. Time.

Background checks? You already need to pass a background check to buy a gun from a gun dealer. You don’t need to pass a check to buy one from a private citizen, or to accept one as a gift from a friend or family member. It is nearly impossible to conceive of a reasonable way to regulate the private sales of private citizens in the secondary market. “Smart guns”? They don’t work, and they can never be counted on to function properly in the few moments when a gun is needed as a matter of life or death. Gun maker liability? An unimaginable can of worms for makers of consumer and industrial products that would kill the domestic manufacture of pharmaceuticals, cars, heavy equipment, alcohol and numerous other things. Not one of these does anything about the 400 million (give or take) guns in circulation in America.

I’m going to take special issue with the last two, which just demonstrate how unserious the left really is about reducing gun crimes. First, the assault weapons ban, which has at least three major issues. First, it addresses (barely) an ill-defined class of weapons without meaningful distinctions. Second, we already banned “assault weapons” for ten years, with no statistically observable impact on gun violence. And finally, most aggravatingly, it addresses a largely insignificant source of gun violence. Banning assault weapons to curb gun violence is like banning Samurai swords to curb stabbings…sure, they are big and scary and they sure seem dangerous, but the actual data says that they are rarely used to kill or injure people.

American gun violence is about handguns. Period. Semi-automatic rifles get headlines, and they are capable of killing more people in small time periods, but the verifiable, demonstrable and undeniable truth is that these injuries are a fucking rounding error in the measurement of gun violence. If you are serious about curbing the rate of gun violence in America, the only meaningful topic you should be attacking right now is the vast number of handguns owned across America right now. If you are hung up on AR-15’s, you’ve completely lost the plot.

You know what else the Founding Fathers didn’t hate? Due process, which seems to be pretty inconvenient to gun control advocates these days. Advocates are, this week, loudly beating the drums for using the FBI’s terrorist watch list as justification for revoking someone’s right to buy a gun. Let’s think about what they are suggesting that we give up because they find the Second Amendment inconvenient at the moment. They would give the FBI, which has a long and sordid history of being racist, corrupt, paranoid and ineffectual and of targeting radicals, protesters, dissidents and critics of the government, to arbitrarily strip US citizens of their enumerated Constitutional rights. They would let the FBI do this without notice, without judicial review, without providing for the right of the accused to defend himself and in fact without the accused ever knowing. Oh, and just for good measure, once you’re on this list, you’re never getting off of it. Never.

Further, the same people on the left who are now calling for this expanded use of the watch list were, not long ago, decrying the same list for its many, many obvious flaws. Apparently, though, since they can now send fundraising emails, they think that it is worth tearing up the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments because they are unhappy with the Second. I wonder if they would feel the same when President Trump announces that all journalists will now need a license issued by his FCC before they can practice journalism..?

The Bill of Rights matters. It matters a lot, and in many ways it matters more than the Constitution proper. Coming up with workarounds to erode the rights laid out in the Bill of Rights is the worst slippery slope I can possibly imagine. We have already seen the government creep further and further into the protections created by the Fourth Amendment, and it has fundamentally changed (for the worse) our relationship with the government. The Second Amendment matters because it was a very important and very intentional inclusion in the Bill of Rights. Ignoring the protections offered by that amendment weaken the entire Bill of Rights in a way that is far more dangerous than an AR-15 could ever be.

So, here’s the deal. You want to cut down on gun violence? You have to take away people’s guns, and you have to take away the fundamental right to own them. Anything else is a counter-productive exercise in making yourself feel better. That is your equation. Do you think that meaningfully reducing gun violence is worth amending the Bill of Rights and revoking the right to bear arms? If you think the answer is yes, and you’d like to have a reasoned discussion around a campaign to amend the Constitution, then have at it. The rules to do so are written down right there in Article V.

If you don’t have the political will or the necessary support, or you’re not willing to have that fight, then just admit that you’re not really serious about reducing gun violence and move on to something else. Stop wasting your time and mine.