A Sensible Approach to Dangerous Objects

Let me be clear about my position. I support a ban on assault rifles, nothing more. I'm all in favor of hunting. I have reservations about the wisdom of "home defense" weapons but simply being unwise is not a reason to make it illegal. The problem I see is private ownership of military weapons, weapons designed to kill large numbers of people fast, consistently (and for obvious reasons) the weapon of choice in the mass murder of school children.

A simple observation: the regulation of dangerous products for public safety is routine in American law. I regularly have difficulty filling my prescription for Ritalin, due to restrictions on the quantity that can be manufactured. The concern is to curtail the dangerous recreational use of the drug, and the (sound) logic is that if only enough drug is made for the legitimate uses, there won't be much available for abuse.

Here's another observation: I don't know of anyone who believes the Second Amendment means we have a right to our own private nuclear arsenal. So the distinction between military arms and civilian arms does exist, and the question is where to draw the line. Granted, there's a long distance between nuclear arms and assault rifles, but the idea that this distinction should be made somewhere is established.

Another observation: in 1787, the gun of a soldier and a hunter were identical (except for the bayonet). The danger of a mass shooting with a muzzle-loading black-powder musket was nil. In 2013, hunting weapons are more potent, but still inadequate to mass shootings. Military weapons are a very different story. So the question of whether the ideas of the Second Amendment still make sense in 2013 is reasonable to ask.

I think the foregoing observations are pretty fairly beyond debate. Exactly what conclusions should be drawn from them is certainly debatable. I raise them simply to establish a working playing field: America law normally regulates dangerous objects, there is a distinction between exclusively military weapons and civilian weapons, and that the nature of military weapons is different now than it was when the 2^nd Amendment was written.

There can be no question that an assault rifle is more dangerous than Ritalin, which raises the question of why we don't make similar efforts for assault weapons. The answer, of course, is the Second Amendment, which establishes bearing arms as a fundamental civil right.
For my part, I've always found the Second Amendment perplexing. Owning guns? We don't have a right to own a house, but we have a right to own a gun? So I've looked into the matter. The first thing one might notice, comparing the Second Amendment to the First, is that it is the only right that includes a justification. There's no mention of why free speech is an important right, or press, but when it comes to bearing arms, the Framers felt compelled to include that this was felt necessary so there could be an "ordered militia" to defend the state. Well, given that there is no "militia" in America anymore, or, insofar as the National Guard is a militia, it maintains its own weapons, there seems to be a gap here.

I read the Federalist where it speaks of the right to bear arms--one of the few contemporary inner views of the formation of the Constitution. Here, the hints found in the justification for the Second Amendment are spelled out. The concern had been raised about whether the Federal government could, with its authority to raise a professional army, disempower the states. Since communities maintained their own militia, made up of most able-bodied men in town, it was thought that no professional army could possibly oppose such a force. The militias could defend state autonomy. It's an interesting defense, but in hindsight one can see that Madison and friends were wrong on many points. It has been tried, and never worked. The ultimate test of this idea was the Civil War, and the feds did succeed in defeating the states, as it were. Ironically, far from the exercise of federal tyranny that Madison and friends feared, it was in the cause of freedom that federal force was used.
Some people have extended this idea of defending the state from federal tyranny to defending the individual. I know some in the Supreme Court disagree, but I can't find any suggestion of this in the Second Amendment, nor in the documentation of the discussion when the Amendment was written. On the other hand, the Constitution itself is quite clear in its opinion of people who take up arms against the government. It's called treason, and its a federal crime, and in much of our history people were hanged for it. It's kind of hard to wrap my brain around the idea that the Constitution establishes you have a right to have a gun to defend yourself from the government, while the government has the right to hang you if you do. From Shay's Rebellion to Ruby Ridge, using force against the government has always been treated as a crime.

More reasonably, and this was an argument I got from The Conservative of all places, this notion that people have a right to use force as a last resort to defend themselves from a democratic government is profoundly undemocratic. The use of force is the weapon of tyrants, not democrats. In a democracy, we work together for the common good. But if we don't like the result we can shoot it dead? I don't think so.

Which, for me, only leaves the question of whether it is good for us. To me, this is a simple calculation. To wit:

1) The idea the Madison et al. advances in the Federalist, that an unarmed citizenry cannot hope to throw off oppression, has been shown to be simply false. The majority of developed, stable democracies in the world have an unarmed citizenry.

2) The idea that gun ownership keeps the populace safe is also contradicted by observation. Countries with strict gun regulation have much lower rates of gun deaths than gun-owning countries. The US leads the world in both gun ownership and shootings. Even within the United States you can see the difference: the states with stricter controls have fewer gun deaths. The US is something of a joke in Japan, which has a very low murder rate: in more than one popular Japanese TV show, characters have quipped when someone pulls out a gun, "where do you think you are, the United States?"

3) School shootings are an American problem. People don't walk in Elementary Schools in England and just murder as many children as possible.

4) While it may be true that many more schoolchildren are killed riding in the bus than by mass murderers, it is abhorrent to think that schools have become a place to go to kill people. Absolutely abhorrent. If you want to do something to make buses and roads safer, let's do it. But I for one cannot stand for mass murder to be a regular school event. We're the only country in the free world that has to drill our children in what to do if a madman comes in shooting.

Fortunately, the steps to solve this problem are not restrictive on law-abiding people. Hunters do not use assault rifles with 50 cartridge magazines. You don't usually get a second shot at a deer, let alone a tenth. Even home defense doesn't require these weapons. There's only one reason someone might get robbed by two-dozen armed men, and that would be because they expect to be met by assault rifles. I understand the motive of the collector to have a really fine sample, but I think collectors need to bow to public safety in this case. A weapon designed by the military to kill large numbers of people fast has no legitimate use, and, given the consequences of its availability, they should be banned.