2nd Amendment Blues

 

"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."

--Second Amendment, United States Constitution

Watching a youtube Obama town hall, I saw a man rise to say that Chicago has among the most onerous gun laws in the nation, and yet it has the highest murder rate, and this in a city run by Democrats who want to take away guns from the good guys, the law abiding citizens who want guns only for their own protection. Wherever Democrats are in charge, the man said, murders by guns are way higher than in Republican places where law abiding good guys can defend themselves with guns.

President Obama responded by saying there is a lot packed into that question, but he began by saying that neither he, nor Hillary Clinton have ever suggested taking away guns legally owned by citizens, even though there are now more guns than citizens in the United States. 

He also noted that Congress has refused to allow the government to study gun deaths. And he pointed out that without confiscating automobiles, the nation has managed to reduce auto accident deaths by government regulation and intervention, requiring seat belts, air bags and certain improvements to road design, implying that government intervention isn't always ineffective and onerous. 

But he might have pointed out, if he really wanted to embarrass this proponent of the "good guy with a gun" theory, there are two flagrantly wrong things about this argument:

1/ Most gun murders or accidental deaths are perpetrated by a good guy with a gun who, until he murders someone with it, was a good guy--the man in an argument at a bar, the outraged husband, the father who shoots his son (a surprisingly, statistically frequent scenario.)

2/ The gun death rate per capita is far higher in Mississippi (33.9) than in Chicago(16.4), higher in Louisiana (29.1 ) than in Philadelphia (18.7), higher in Alabama (26.4) than in Washington, DC (18.2)  higher in Wyoming (26.1), Montana (25.1), Alaska (25.2), Tennessee (22.8) than in Chicago (16.4). 

So those red states where gun ownership is so high, where the good guys own the guns, are places where the good guys are killing their fellow citizens at far greater rates than in those supposedly wild and untamed urban centers where President Trump says there is nothing but mayhem and chaos.

Of course, death rates by jurisdiction and guns are all about statistics: Are we going to add in death by guns for suicides? (Do suicides even belong in this discussion?)  Are we including only homicides or do we add in accidental deaths where a child finds a gun and shoots his brother? And then there is the odd fact, often unmentioned, that the likelihood of your dying by a gunshot is highly related to how quickly you can be got to a trauma center where they have surgeons who are really good at treating gunshot wounds. Part of why people who are shot in Mississippi die so often is that when they do get shot, they are a long way from any trauma surgeon.

But the fact is, if you want to talk about where you are most likely to be shot by someone, and fatally, it has never been the big Democratic cities; it has been the deep Red, Confederate South. 

Why this image of the violent inner city has been so widely accepted as truth is complex, but it surely includes the depiction in film and media of city carnage ("The Wire," LAPD etc) but also it fits the preconceived notion of the white guy who posed the question to President Obama, namely that we got Black guys with guns in those cities, and even out here in suburbia and we need White guys with guns to shoot them. This was clearly as subtext, as the White guy posing the question was saying all this murder is happening in those urban centers with strict gun laws (which just happen to be Black) and so we need to arm our Whites.

And then there is the right to individual gun ownership: Until 2008, every court at state level (even in Texas and the Confederate states) and the federal level and the Supreme Court stated the obvious: There are two parts to the 2nd Amendment, and the part about gun ownership being tied to a "well regulated militia" has always meant individual ownership is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

You can refer to all the wise men who said this is so, or you can simply believe those who do not want to accept this, like Antonin Scalia, who wrote the opinion in Heller v DC, which said individual gun ownership is in fact guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, and all that jurisprudence, all those scores of decision and opinions between 1789 and 2008 were wrong and it all depends on the history and what the founding fathers meant by words like "the people" and how you define "the people" and "bear arms" and what "keep" means. You see Justice Scalia tying himself into knots to get to the place he was determined to get to in the first place: Gun ownership cannot be interfered with, not in Washington, DC nor in New York City, places where you might think restrictions on gun ownership might be a public health good.

Then there is the whole topic of whether what we think of a man owning a gun as he travels across the continent, in his Conestoga wagon in 1859, across hostile Indian territory, might be different from what we think about a man who lives today in Columbine, Colorado or Newtown, Connecticut, where Sandy Hook school was found--whether the circumstances of new problems in new times might make us want to think anew for new solutions.

All of this is well reviewed in "One Nation Under Guns," by Dominic Erdozain. 

Mad Dog was pleased to see him say what Mad Dog has often said about Heller--it is one of those infamous, ignominious decisions which will take its rightful place alongside decisions like the Dred Scott decision, which hinged on the idea that a slave is not a human being, or Plessey, which sanctified racial segregation. But Heller is distinctive because it disregarded all prior decisions, it crushed the idea of stare decisis, i.e. that any decision by a court ought to be consistent with prior decisions on a subject. Scalia was so determined to get to the result he wanted, he simply abandoned all principle to get there. The only principle which counted for Scalia was guns are good.

And so, our Court, has almost by itself, allowed for the ongoing reality that we will have schoolhouse slaughter for the foreseeable future and shopping centers, concerts, really any public venue where Americans gather, will continue to be bathed in the blood of citizens sacrificed on the alter of the good guy with the gun.

The Sacred Right to Murder Mallards

In a sense, Heller raises a bigger problem than just the 2nd amendment. It goes to that famous remark from Roy Cohn to Donald Trump: "Don't tell me about the law: tell me about the judge."  This is the key insight--America is not a nation of laws, but a nation of people with opinions and the law can always be bent and interpreted to get to the result you want. If that is true, then the Supreme Court of the United States is nothing more than one more political group, guided only by the prejudices of the judges, and ought to be treated that way. If Mad Dog had his way, every new President could appoint 3 new justices per term and the justices would rotate from the federal judiciary in and out of the Court. They would still serve for life pending "good Behaviour" but they would no longer hold the nation hostage for 30 years at a time.