Founders would have fixed our gun laws
They wouldn’t want kids dying in their names
Amid all we know about the Founding Fathers, two things stand out in the wake of yet another mass shooting that underscores the desperate need for action and the depth of our paralysis.
The first is that nearly a third of the 39 delegates who signed the Constitution endured the tragedy of losing children. By one count, 24 sons and daughters born to a dozen signers died before adulthood. The second is that these and the other Founders were among the greatest change-makers in history. They were America’s first #Resist movement, and fought an actual war to create a future unbound by the past.
Does anyone think they would expect us to live by a 230-year-old document? Would they stand by, reciting the centuries-old Second Amendment, if their own children were endangered — in school, at malls, in movie theaters, on city streets — by easy access to guns? Or would they start us on the road to universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods and other steps most Americans say they want?
Wherever these men are now, I envision them wringing their hands and muttering, “Even Antonin Scalia …” No less an originalist than the late Supreme Court justice wrote in the definitive 2008 Heller opinion that individuals have a right to own guns but governments have a right to reasonably regulate them, and “weapons that are most useful in military service — M-16 rifles and the like” — are not necessarily covered by the Second Amendment.
The Founders could not anticipate the scale of social unrest, mental illness and religious extremism in a nation of nearly 328 million. They could not foresee how mass and social media would magnify those realities and in too many cases inspire gun violence. They did not know we would develop unimaginably devastating weapons of war and sell them to civilians. They didn’t realize that the Second Amendment would lead to decades of political warfare.
James Madison proposed this language: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
“The whole context of the amendment was always military,” understood to refer to state militias, historian Garry Wills wrote in a 1995 analysis in The New York Review of Books. The last phrase does not appear in the final version of the amendment, but in Wills’ view, it clarified Madison’s intent: “When he excepted those with religious scruple, he made clear that ‘bear arms’ meant wage war — no Quaker was to be deprived of his hunting gun.”
The Founders would be the first to say that they and their blueprint for America were imperfect — limited by their experiences, their era, their differences, the difficult compromises they had to make. They were trying to solve problems, of empire and monarchy and, to some degree, inequity. If they were here now, they might feel an urgency about gun violence that most of today’s politicians do not. So many of them suffered the death of one or more children. They would understand the kind of loss that shapes you, might even ruin you, for the rest of your life.
Alexander Hamilton certainly would have gotten it. His son, Philip, died at 19 in a gun duel, just as his father would three years later. “Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton has been,” his friend Robert Troup wrote after Philip’s death.
John Adams probably would have understood as well. He was away in 1776 when his wife, Abigail, unilaterally decided to have a doctor inject her and their four children with live smallpox virus. The inoculation was dangerous, but Abigail’s bet paid off: Her family (including John, who had been immunized in 1764), survived the epidemic then ravaging the Boston area.
Abigail Adams memorably urged her husband in a 1776 letter to “remember the ladies.” The ladies have come far since then and continue to inch forward. If she were writing to him today, she might well be instructing him to “remember the children.”
Jill Lawrence is commentary editor of USA TODAY and author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.