THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: ARE SOME RIGHTS NO LONGER RIGHTS?

THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: ARE SOME RIGHTS NO LONGER RIGHTS?

What is guaranteed to us in the U. S. Constitution and its amendments—including what we call the Bill of Rights—is sacrosanct, supposedly. But the Preamble says that “all men are created equal”—and we needed a presidential proclamation, three Constitutional amendments, and the passage of civil rights legislation to get that equality defined. It wasn’t that we decided that the Founding Fathers—many of them slave-owners—intended to make black people or women “equal” from the beginning; we knew and know full well that they didn’t. So what we said, to begin to make racial or sexual discrimination illegal, was either that the Founding Fathers should have intended equality for men of all races and both sexes from the beginning, or that times—and our thinking, our understanding—had changed .

In 1920 we passed and ratified an amendment to the U. S. Constitution which wasn’t really an amendment but an addition: the Constitution didn’t mention alcohol in any way. But we banned its consumption—until we passed and ratified another amendment, thirteen years later, making alcoholic beverages legal again.

Did the Founding Fathers intend, when they drew up the Second Amendment, to give each of us the right to own a gun? Probably so, given the times. But maybe they only meant to authorize the arming of a properly created and authorized militia. Since we can’t determine which it was, we turn—as we have in the past—to what the right thing seems for the present.

The justification for prohibition was the harm alcohol did in our society, not that drinking was sinful. Dancing and bingo and divorce might have been prohibited as “sinful,” but never were. (Nor—despite what Justice Scalia has written—are there laws prohibiting masturbation.) But the harm to society that Americans perceived as attributable to alcohol led us to ratify a constitutional amendment prohibiting its consumption. When the amendment was repealed, it was because prohibition was harming our society—or the society of enough of us—more than alcohol had done.

The justification for making hand-guns and assault rifles illegal, without registration and permission, is that unrestricted private gun-ownership results in much bloodshed in this country every day. Our violence is destroying us. It’s not a matter of whether the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee to each of us the right to own and carry—“keep and bear”—guns; and we don’t need to argue that the authors of the Bill of Rights wanted only militiamen to have the right to such. Today, in America, we can’t afford to have everybody carrying guns, owning pistols and AK-47s and Ouzis.

We need to ban unregistered, unlicensed guns. Whatever the Supreme Court does in the current Washington, D.C. case, Congress needs either to enact legislation or to pass an amendment to the Constitution, explicitly limiting the extent of the right to bear arms established in the second amendment.

Bert Hornback 20 March 2008