Let’s have the difficult conversations about guns

What part of ‘Shall Not Be Infringed’ is unclear?”

That was one of the signs at the gun-rights rally Monday afternoon in the City-County Building portico. Here’s one that wasn’t there:

How can a constitutional amendment that begins with the phrase “a well regulated Militia’’ come to be interpreted as barring almost any regulation at all?

The Second Amendment reads thusly: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

There is more than one version of the text, with capitalization and punctuation differences. But any way you present it, the verbiage is open to interpretation.

Warren E. Burger, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard M. Nixon and chief justice from 1969 to 1986, said in a 1991 public television interview: “If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment ... This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

He was speaking of the broad interpretation of an individual’s right to bear arms championed by the National Rifle Association and its allies, who often quote only the second part of the amendment. Whatever Burger’s misgivings, the Second Amendment is not going anywhere, and the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights is even more forthright. Article 1, Section 21, of the state constitution says: “The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.”

The General Assembly has been far more scrupulous in strictly interpreting that constitutional right than, say, this one in Section 21: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” Late in 1993, Pittsburgh City Council President Jack Wagner, a Marine veteran wounded in Vietnam, successfully pushed legislation to ban the sale and possession of semi-automatic weapons in Pittsburgh — but the Legislature quashed it the following year.

The new state law gave the Legislature sole right to regulate guns. That remains on the books, so gun advocates are right when they say the current push by Mayor Bill Peduto and council for banning high-powered weapons and ammunition is unenforceable. Even the mayor’s office concedes that; mayoral spokesman Tim McNulty says they’re working with state Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill, to change state law.

Mr. Frankel said his bill would allow local governments to pass commonsense restrictions on guns. Philadelphia’s local gun ordinances were snuffed out the same year Pittsburgh’s were, but Mr. Frankel saw progress when overwhelming support in the last legislative session brought a new law to take the guns of convicted domestic abusers.

The gun lobby long has had more power in Harrisburg than the state’s two largest cities, and that remains true with still-comfortable Republican majorities in both the state House and Senate. But Mr. Frankel notes that 11 House seats in metro Philadelphia flipped from Republican to Democrat, and “the gun issue was a material contributor to that change.”

The gun enthusiasts, mostly from outside the city, arrived Downtown by the hundreds Monday, openly armed, and the crowd spilled down city hall’s steps into a lane of Grant Street that had been blocked off. There were loud moments, but it was a peaceable assembly (and, it should be noted, the Second Amendment was read in full).

I saw only one guy in the hourplus I was there who seemed to have been sent by central casting to play the loud-mouthed, rightwing jerk. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, he screamed obscenely in the face of a counter-demonstrator quietly offering leaflets decrying the paranoid conspiracy theories of Alex Jones. (Mr. Jones is the loon who said the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.)

Dave Ninehouser, of Ambridge, the man with the leaflets, stayed put as his froth-mouthed foe was ushered away gently by a younger man with with a semiautomatic rifle strapped across his shoulders and a cooler head atop them.

Mr. Ninehouser, co-founder of the nonprofit Hear Yourself Think with his wife, Erin, said, “We have to have difficult conversations.”

That we do. We, the people, still make the rules. And everyone needs to be heard.