In the midst of all the hoopla, I was reminded of a beautifully written essay by Garret Keizer that appeared two years ago in Harper's (which, unfortunately, doesn't make its archives available to the ragtag viewing public).
Keizer makes the progressive argument against gun control, and, coupled with the questionable efficacy of local gun bans, it's one that I find quite convincing. A choice excerpt:
As the living embodiment of progress itself, a progressive is beyond rage, beyond "the politics of yesterday," and certainly beyond anything as retro as a gun. More than I fear fundamentalists who wish to teach religious myths in place of evolution, I fear progressives who wish to teach evolution in place of political science. Or, rather, who forget a central principle of evolutionary thought: that no species completely outgrows its origins.
Like democracy, for example. What is that creature if not the offspring of literacy and ballistics? Once a peasant can shoot down a knight, the writing is on the wall, including the writing that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
...
If the Second Amendment is a dispensable anachronism in the era of school shootings, might not the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments be dispensable anachronisms during a "war on terror"?
3 comments:
Bricks, I feel this argument on the Second Amendment. Only a really tortured reading of the language supports the idea that the right to bear arms is somehow conditioned on the existence of a militia; and since the right seems pretty clear, how can we toss it for expediency's sake?
But it's the whole process/consequences problem. The practical result of the decision is surely that lots of gun control laws will be struck down, and even more guns will flood onto the streets. Other constitutional rights can be restricted--what kind of restrictions would be okay on this one? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure how many of them would pass the Court's scrutiny.
Before the decision, Americans already had more gun rights than just about any population on the planet. Now, what, we have more?
I'm not sure I agree that the "practical result of the decision is surely that lots of gun control laws will be struck down, and even more guns will flood onto the streets," because I'm not sure if the evidence supports it (I'll surf around for more studies on this if I have time tonight or tomorrow).
But think about it: if guns are easy to purchase in, say, Indiana, or Maryland, I don't think anyone who actually wanted a gun and didn't give a damn about breaking the law would have any problem getting one and bringing it into DC or Chicago. I doubt criminals have much trouble getting guns into the city at all, no matter how regulated they are.
Instead, it's only law abiding citizens who are affected by gun bans. Many of these people live in exactly the kind of neighborhoods where someone might rightly mistrust the government, or, at the very least, lack confidence in the local government's ability to properly protect them.
There are still reasonable limits in the Heller decision, as I understand it. Here's the crucial passage that reels it in: "It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home."
There you have it- people are entitled to own guns that could reasonably be used for self-defense across the nation as a whole. Society can decide, as a whole, to regulate weapons, but laws that leave innocent city dwellers at the mercy of out-of-state gunrunners and lawbreakers are verboten.
Makes sense to me, and I doubt the result will be drastically more guns in the inner city. The inner city's already pretty gunned up.
Am I drastically misunderstanding something?
(Do I sound like a gun nut? I'm not.)
Also, I'm going to write a post in the near future about the importance of giving up positions that feel good but mainly serve as distractions from core problems like poverty, class mobility and economic justice. I personally think that gun control, at least the way it's debated now, falls under this category.
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