The Second Amendment is the issue
Like everyone else, I am impressed with the organizational efforts by some young survivors of the Feb .14 Parkland, Fla., school shooting which claimed 17 lives. This should not be taken to mean that I approve, in general, of giving a bundle of microphones and loads of prime- time television to the legislative ideas of collateral victims of crime. This is a media habit, almost certainly a bad one, that is inherently difficult for us to break.
We live by exploiting the deep human attachment to personal narrative. This addiction used to lead to extralegal vengeance, to lynchings. Now we channel that mob energy into impulsive action against the legal status quo, which is a decided improvement, but the impulsiveness is still there.
Yet the activist Parkland kids have performed with great effectiveness in the wake of a terrible calamity. If nothing else, they must be regarded as a testament to the quality of Stoneman Douglas High School. They have scarce ly finished burying classmates, but they have presented an understated, reasonable, determined face to the American media, and created what looks like a visible change in public opinion. A CNN poll conducted by the firm SSRS on Feb. 20-23 found that nationwide support for “stricter gun laws” had risen to historic highs on all fronts, with the spikes on the chart being atypically large compared to those that followed other mass shootings.
On the meta level, in the clouds where we columnists like to caper, this is being taken as a possible trans format ive moment for youth involvement in politics. But that surely depends on whether the moment endures. The students have chosen to focus their energy on the National Rifle Association and the politicians to which it is beholden. They have also succeeded in applying commercial pressure to corporate friends of the NRA — in particular, t hey seem to have persuaded a number of big car rental firms to drop benefits and discounts for NRA cardholders, which seems like a shrewd way to choke off the financial oxygen from NRA membership sales. And makes you wonder a little bit why those discounts were there in the first place.
Here’ s my problem: wouldn’t a truly profound and permanent change in U.S. gun politics take the form of an explicit campaign against the Second Amendment? This is the dog that keeps not barking in the political life of the U.S. For decades there was a great deal of give-and-take on gun regulation among national and local governments in the U. S. because the precise power of the Second Amendment had not been thoroughly adjudicated.
The amendment (as ratified) says that “A well regulated militia being necessar y to t he s ec urity of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That nominative absolute clause before the comma permitted s ome useful uncertainty about the purpose and nature of the right to bear arms, and gun- control advocates were not afraid to throw in some contrived confusion about what “arms” are and what it might mean to “bear” them.
But this changed with 2008’s Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller; advocates of gun rights found a promising case and brought the ancient questions before the Supreme Court for the first time. The result was that the right to bear arms was found to pertain to individuals in their private capacity — not merely as hypothetical participants in a “militia”, if that matters — and to guarantee that the American state would not interfere with the use of guns for purely personal self-defence.
In Heller, the majority of the Court stipulated that some regulatory limits to who can bear arms, and to what kind of arms they can bear, are still potentially possible. But one could not help noticing that the “militia” clause was always going to be a problem for the gun-controllers who emphasized it: if we take the clause seriously, it must mean that the “right to bear arms,” however exercised in practice, must involve militarygrade means of “defence.” Violent resistance to authority is one of the premises of the American revolution. Anyone who can’t live with that idea needs to consider moving to the neighbour that didn’t have a revolution.
The Parkland kids are focused on weakening the NRA politically. This might be a necessary prelude to a long- term attack on the Second Amendment as such — but, of course, i f they were to admit that the entrenched, Heller- hardened right to bear arms is the real problem, the hysteria and conspiracy theorizing with which the activists are already being greeted would be a hundred times harsher. And the NRA’s membership would double before you can say Annie Oakley.
Nonetheless, if the underlying political sentiments of t he American public have changed, a constitutional push should be possible: the Equal Rights Amendment of the 1970s came within a breath of passing. Sometimes it’s politically useful to be an older person who remembers stuff like that!