Craig Whitney - Living With Guns: A Liberals Case for the Second Amendment

Table of Contents

SECOND AMENDMENT TO THE
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES,
RATIFIED AS PART OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS, 1791

TIMOTHY DWIGHT IV, TRAVELS IN
NEW-ENGLAND AND NEW-YORK, 1823

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA,
US SUPREME COURT, MAJORITY OPINION IN
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER, 2008

JUSTICE STEPHEN G. BREYER,
US SUPREME COURT, DISSENTING OPINION IN
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER, 2008

Mention the Second Amendment, and all too often, people reach for their revolvers. Discussion degenerates into a hysteria that may win elections for hard-liners and fund lobbying campaigns but changes nothing. Living with Guns is my attempt to defuse that hysteria.

Americans on both sides of the debate about guns can and must find common ground. We can only begin to claim it by reexamining the right to bear arms, what it means, why it was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and how it came to be misunderstood. The bottom line is that our national affinity for firearms isnt going away, no matter what anti-gun advocates would like to think. True believers in gun rights may not have all the answers, but they are certainly right about one thing: We can live with guns. We have no other choice, with so many of them around.

Do Americans have an individual constitutional right to own and use guns? Living with Guns maintains that the Second Amendment recognizes that they do have that individual right. A conservative majority of the Supreme Court has said they do, too, in two 54 rulings in 2008 and 2010 against handgun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. The Court went further, finding that the Second Amendment gave Americans that right primarily for self-defense. Many state legislatures around the country say Americans have an individual right to firearms; all states but Illinois, plus the District of Columbia and some cities, like New York, allow carrying of handguns in most places. Stand-your-ground or castle-doctrine laws in many states make it easier to legally justify killing in self-defense. Yet the constitutional right to bear arms does not make people who carry guns a law unto themselves.

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood-watch-patrol volunteer who shot a seventeen-year-old black teenager in February 2012 as he was walking back to his fathers girlfriends home in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, told police that he used the 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, which he had a license to carry, in self-defense. The boy attacked him and was pounding his head into the ground face-first, putting him in mortal fear for his life, he claimed.

But standing police instructions to Zimmerman and all other neighborhood volunteers in Sanford are that volunteers have no business carrying guns when they are on patrol. Zimmerman reported the teenager, walking through the rain with his hoodie up, as a suspicious possible intruder, and then acknowledged to a police dispatcher that he had left his car to follow the boy after he started running. OK, we dont need you to do that, the dispatcher told Zimmerman, who replied, OK.

If George Zimmerman had followed these instructions and stayed in his vehicle, Trayvon Martin would still be alive today, and Zimmerman would not have been charged with second-degree murder, facing a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted. He had, of course, a constitutional right to bear armsa uniquely American right, but one that is subject to reasonable regulation in the interest of public safety. It is also a right that, from its origins in colonial days, has always been connected with civic duty.

There are 300 million guns in America today, about 100 million of them handguns, and probably at least 60 million gun owners. Yet, to listen to the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party in the 2012 election campaign, you would think Second Amendment rights were hanging by a thread. Mitt Romney warned that the Supreme Court could reverse itself if President Barack Obama were reelected and got a chance to pack the Court with liberal justices who would rule in favor of strict gun control. In contrast, he promised, he would be a president who would protect Second Amendment rights and stand up for hunters and those who seek to protect their homes and families. Obama had said little about gun rights in four years in the White House, but conservatives and the NRA worked themselves into a lather over Attorney General Eric Holder, accusing him of being a lifelong anti-gun extremist and of using concerns about Mexican drug cartels smuggling guns across the border as a pretext for imposing new restrictions on American gun owners. The frenzy built in 2011 after a botched federal sting operation called Fast and Furious that allowed some gun dealers to sell arms to suspected smugglers in hopes of tracing them to the cartels in Mexico. Instead, the authorities lost track of them, and two of the weapons turned up at the scene of the killing of a border patrol agent in a shootout near the border in Arizona in late 2010. Holder told a congressional hearing he could not explain how it happened, and the Justice Department started requiring licensed firearms dealers in the four Southwest border states to report all multiple rifle purchaseslaw-abiding gun users and straw men for smugglers alike.

After the 2012 election, the gun wars that have been going on since the 1960s seem likely to continue, unless something happens to change the way both liberals and conservatives, supporters of gun rights and proponents of gun control, look at each others positions on this issue.

Living with Guns offers a different way of looking at the Second Amendment, one that might make it easier for both sides to find common ground, if our political leaders would stop listening to lobbyists who pander to fearswhether fear of guns or fear of losing the right the Second Amendment protectsand start trying instead to find realistic solutions to the real gun problems we have.