Op-Ed Claims Gun Control Is a ‘Constitutional Imperative’

The Second Amendment is pretty explicit. “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t get a lot clearer than that.

And yet, many people keep trying to infringe on the shall not be infringeable. They’ve made it their missions, even their careers, to do what the Founding Fathers expressly forbid anyone from doing.

That’s just how it is. There are always those who want to take away our freedoms.

But it always infuriates me when they try to use the Constitution to try and justify it.

This piece is titled, “Why gun regulation in the US is as much a constitutional imperative as is the right to bear arms,” so I expected to see constitutional justifications for gun control. What I got was this:

There is a curious irony at the heart of America’s gun debate. The United States Constitution, that hallowed document brandished with almost religious fervour, is held up by gun rights advocates like a holy writ.

But in their defence of the Second Amendment’s promise of a “right to bear arms,” they consistently ignore the other more dominant constitutional truth: that liberty, safety and public confidence in civic life are not just compatible with gun regulation — they demand it.

When it comes to guns in the US, the language of rights has long been monopolised by those who would see guns in classrooms, supermarkets and statehouses. Courts, influenced by a small but vocal lobby, seem to have have narrowed the concept of “public safety” to the purely corporeal — as if the only injury worth considering is a bullet wound.

But surely in a functioning democracy, the freedom to live without fear, to vote without intimidation, to send one’s child to school without practising lockdown drills in blood-spattered rehearsals — these are rights, too. From a UK perspective these are rights we very much take for granted. And for those of us looking at the US and its experience with guns, it is clear that they are have long been undermined.

This narrow judicial vision of rights as being somehow more aligned with the right to carry arms than the right to live without fear – especially in America’s increasingly activist conservative courts – is not merely blinkered. It is dangerous. A government that cannot regulate to protect the foundational liberties of its citizens — speech, assembly, religion, education — because it cannot prove, with mathematical certainty, that a gun law will save x number of lives, is not a government worthy of the name. It is a hostage to a libertarian absolutism that elevates one constitutional clause over all others.

Now, I find this interesting on a lot of levels.

First, there’s this idea that there is a “freedom to live without fear” in the first place and that, in order to have that, we must pass gun control in direct contradiction to the plain text of the Second Amendment. Further, we have the idea that the author’s version of living without fear somehow trumps my own, which would permit me to have the means to defend myself and my family from any and all threats one man could possibly protect himself and his family from.

Whose idea is paramount if the “freedom to live without fear” is so sacrosanct?

But while the Founding Fathers did believe the Constitution contained the totality of human rights, it does not explicitly preserve any such right. The word “fear,” for example, appears nowhere in the text. “Safety” only appears once, and then in response to when the Writ of Habeas Corpus could be suspended.

So it’s not there, yet this dipstick wants us to ignore what they said and focus on what wasn’t said.

Then again, let’s also note that there is no way to preserve a “freedom to live without fear” or anything of the sort. Some people are afraid of their own shadows for no reason. Others are traumatized by things that make them fearful of circumstances for the rest of their lives, such as surviving a horrible hurricane or tornado. How can we preserve their “freedom to live without fear” when the wind gets rowdy?

You can’t.

For someone claiming this is a “constitutional imperative,” all the author does is bloviate about the fact that he really wants gun control, and we won’t let him have his way. This isn’t a point of legitimate debate, it’s a toddler’s tantrum because he still hasn’t learned he can’t just do whatever he wants.

That’s without getting into the fact that Europe willingly gave up their guns, and now their doors are getting kicked in by the police over memes.

Of course, this guy had the cajones to pretend gun control would preserve the right to free speech.

LOL.