Guns & the Court

The Supreme Court's decision to find in the Constitution the right to bear arms, apart from a "well-regulated militia, is not a shock. It is a disappointment. Okay, so far I'm completely predictable as a liberal. However, I am not anti-gun. I am a former member of the NRA and a hunter.

This decision is a good example of the old legal adage that bad cases make for bad laws. The Washington DC statute was badly written, ill-conceived and unequally applied. Their complete ban on handguns in a crime-ridden city with guns available just a few miles away was bound to be thrown out on some grounds. Common sense comes to mind.

Unless guns are banned nationally, gun free zones are counter-productive. They make true the NRA motto that "if you criminalize guns only the criminals will have guns."
The place to deal with gun violence is in licensing and enforcement. Gun crime ought to be punished automatically with twice the severity of non-gun crime. Yes, I know that if you stab or club someone to death, it is the same for the victim. But we do have a larger societal context and culture. Background checks to keep guns out of the hands of people with violent criminal records or mental issues make sense to me.

This is why, while I am happy to murder helpless skeet and to hunt, I am a former member of the NRA. They resist virtually every restriction on guns and ammunition with the slippery slope argument that all legislation is only a first step to confiscation. Of course, we are not going to ban guns from the nation; nor will we confiscate the somewhere around 200 million guns already in our hands. It just can't be done. But as to the Constitution and the original intent, it is nearly impossible to believe that when the Founders wanted citizens to have guns, they could have foreseen Uzis, Kalishnikofs, AK-47s, grenade launchers and armor piercing ammo. Although, maybe Jefferson could have known.