Republicans in the U.S. Senate have made themselves quite clear. With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, they want the next president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. Conservative legal victories like some rulings on gun rights could hang in the balance.
Here’s what the amendment says: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Commentator Austin Sarat, who teaches law at Amherst College and writes for Politico, says the way he sees it, the language in the second amendment doesn’t mean individuals have a constitutionally protected right to the private possession of firearms, and he says, in the past, the Supreme Court has seen likewise.
Indeed, four times between 1876 and 2008, the Supreme Court has supported my view by declining to rule that the Second Amendment protects individual gun ownership. In one of those cases, the court held that that amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms only for certain military purposes. It does not curtail the legislature’s power to regulate the nonmilitary use and ownership of weapons.
Then, in 2008, in one of this country’s most controversial supreme court decisions, Heller v the District of Columbia, the court abruptly changed course. It decided 5 to 4 that the amendment does protect an individual’s right to possess a firearm unconnected with any service in an organized and sanctioned militia. At the time the Heller decision was subject to a torrent of criticism. It was attacked as bad law and as bad policy. Moreover, 15 distinguished professors of early American history argued that “the authors of the second amendment would be flabbergasted” to learn that in endorsing the principle of a well-regulated militia, they were also allowing unfettered possession of firearms.
Yet today, not even ten years later, one hears little about Heller in the public debate about guns, even during this run-up to the presidential election. Our political leaders are silent because challenging the idea that private individuals have a right to own as many guns as they wish seems to them to be political suicide.
Americans should demand that Heller be reversed. Something more than regulating types of firearms or providing for background checks is needed to stop the flood of individual gun ownership and the epidemic of gun violence.
It is time to remind our leaders that the Second Amendment pertains only to what is necessary to protect “a free state”, not an individual in that state, and that our constitution allows the government to forbid individual gun ownership altogether. Or to require a damn good reason why someone needs one.
Only by radically reducing the number of firearms will we be able to go to the movies, to school or church without the threat of serious injury or death at the hands of a gunman clothed in a warped interpretation of his Second Amendment rights.