Sunday, May 29, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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June is just around the corner and with it will come one of the most highly anticipated rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. While we don’t know the specifics of the ruling yet, we do know that the justices are taking a hard look at the text of the Constitution. They’re also considering the meaning of several laws and regulations as they have been understood by generations of Americans during the nearly 250-year history of our country. Finally, they are weighing the rights of adults seeking to engage in private decisions about potential risks to their health and welfare vs. the rights of innocent babes, with near limitless potential for the future.
The case at hand is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, and the rights at issue are Second Amendment gun rights.
This is not the first time the court has tackled the meaning of the Second Amendment. In fact, the individual right to bear arms is so well established that it goes all the way back to a time when Twitter only allowed 140 characters per tweet and smartphones lacked GPS navigation capabilities.
In 2008, the Supreme Court established the individual right to bear arms by actively ignoring 13 of the 27 words contained in the Second Amendment. The words they ignored clearly and obviously limited the right to own and possess a firearm to members of regulated state militias that could defend the states from hostile attacks in the absence of a standing army. This meaning would not have prohibited non-militia members from possessing a firearm, but would have made the issue a non-right, subject to whatever regulation was deemed appropriate by elected legislators.
Instead of reading this very plain language in its most obvious and logical form, the court instead engaged in some Simone Biles-level linguistic gymnastics and effectively made the first half of the Amendment disappear.
To save face, the justices included guidance that restrictions may be placed on individuals or weapons that do not have a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” This caveat is what allows for restrictions on violent felons and other individuals who pose a significant threat to society and / or cannot be trusted to uphold the regulations or support the well-regulated militia should they be needed. It is also the primary legal underpinning for the National Rifle Association-backed argument that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Unfortunately, no amount of verbal gymnastics by the court can make the “good guys with guns” take action. As the shooter in Uvalde, Texas, unloaded 315 bullets into innocent children, 19 heavily armed “good guys” cowered outside the classroom awaiting even more backup.
No amount of “Call of Duty” or Clint Eastwood films could make them feel prepared to take on an AR-15-style DDM4V7 rifle in a head-on assault. The gun and the gunman were simply too dangerous. That’s the point sane Americans have been trying to make for decades: Some weapons, like assault rifles with high-capacity magazines, are simply too lethal to be in civilian hands.
One of the survivors, an 11-year-old, covered herself in a classmate’s blood so the shooter would think she had already been wounded. Turns out quick thinking fourth-graders are better at saving themselves than the formally trained “good guys with guns” outside.
Too often it seems the only people the “good guys with guns” actually shoot are innocent Black guys without guns, but that’s a separate editorial.
Of course, insecurity painted with a veneer of toxic masculinity isn’t unique to law enforcement, it’s a problem too many men in America face generally. It suggests that if we can’t make headway on gun control for society as a whole, perhaps we should be focused on gun control for men more specifically.
Gun violence is now the leading injury-related cause of death among children and teens, and guns are the most commonly used tool of mass murderers in American society. And the National Institute of Justice reports that almost 98% of mass shooters are male.
Despite being significantly more likely to be the victims of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence than their male counterparts, women commit just 8% of firearms-related violence in the United States. And, as previously mentioned, comprise only 2% of mass shooters.
None of this would even be in question if the Supreme Court simply reversed its magic trick and made those first 13 words of the Second Amendment reappear. This would not only help solve a real threat to our children and communities today but would be in line with the first 230 years of U.S. history.
Republicans talk about wanting to “Make America Great Again” and return the country to a time when violence didn’t run rampant in our schools and streets. While we find the rhetoric of returning to a past that was filled with racism, sexism, homophobia and other significant societal oppression to be generally disturbing, there is one point we can agree on:
Our country was a better place when our elementary school children didn’t have to worry about whether they would return home from school alive.
But the current state of affairs is not the result of liberal policies. It’s the result of a non-sensical interpretation of the Second Amendment that gives guns a greater right to safety than our children.
The robes of the justices do not make them infallible. They admitted as much in the leaked opinion overturning Roe.
As long as they’re busy trying to correct their past mistakes, they should fix the mistake that took the lives of 19 children in Uvalde, Texas. If they don’t, the blood is on their robes.
