Some thoughts on constitutional carry
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” So says the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It seems at first glance to be a very simple statement, in real life it seems to be anything but, considering it has been the subject of countless lawsuits and endless debate at least since the middle of the last century.
The truth is the gun control debate has attracted some exceedingly strange bedfellows in the course of its history. Indeed, that great conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, was once a supporter of gun control.
The United States is by far the most heavily armed nation in the world, but gun control laws actually go back much further than one might think. In 1833 for example, the state of Georgia passed a law making it illegal for any “free person of colour” to “own, use, or carry…” firearms of any sort. These sorts of laws varied but were fairly common up until the end of the Jim Crow-era.
Farther west, we find gun control far more generalized that one might expect. Contrary to Hollywood’s myth of gun-totin’ cowboys and gunslingers, gun control laws were not at all uncommon in the “Wild West.” Such iconic western towns as Dodge City and Tombstone for example, had very restrictive gun control laws to prevent folks from getting too far out of hand with their disputes.
In some cases, states passed gun control laws as well, Alabama for example passed gun control laws as early as the 1840s. What the gun control laws of this era have in common is that they were exclusively enacted by local jurisdictions or by states with the Federal Government remaining on the sidelines. In the twentieth century, the Federal Government got into the act with the National Firearms Act of 1934. Passed in response to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the NFA imposed restrictions on sawedoff shotguns, machine guns, and other weapons perceived to be favored by organized crime.
In 1938 the NFA was followed by the similarly named Federal Firearms Act which, among other things, made it illegal to sell firearms to convicted felons as well as adding a requirement for firearms dealers to be licensed. From there gun control remained a sleepy backwater of bureaucracy until the late 1960s.
The decade of the 1960s was a crazy time, rock and roll, civil rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, even without the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, it would have been a crazy decade. But with political assassinations, race riots, and well-armed members of the Black Panthers patrolling the streets of some big cities, it is little wonder that conservative leaders such as Reagan and others enthusiastically supported an update to the nation’s gun control laws. The result was the Gun Control Act of 1968. In the decades since ’68, the gun control debate has migrated from a debate over crime to a Culture War issue of the first order. In the same period, we have seen plenty of evil deeds perpetrated without the assistance of firearms. Atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide, which was largely perpetrated with machetes, teach us that evil does not require a firearm to express itself.
“Constitutional Carry” is once again being debated under the Gold Dome.
Given the nature of politics today, it is likely to pass. Will it make our communities more safe, or less safe? That remains to be seen. Criminals as a general rule, do not bother complying with gun control laws anyway, and the average armed citizen is not a stone killer, so it is unlikely to make us any less safe than we are now. On the other hand, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence pointing to armed citizens both preventing crime and saving lives. Only time will tell.
One thing we can learn from the unpleasantness in Rwanda is that intent matters far more than weapon. Whether less restrictive carry laws make us more or less safe remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, we will not be truly safe until we find some way to address the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.