Not the price of freedom
Look at the photos of the 19 children — fourth-graders about to celebrate the beginning of summer — and ask if collectively we did all we could to protect them from a traumatic, painful death in a place they thought was safe. Many of the photos grieving families are releasing were taken the day before the shooting as students celebrated making the honor roll.
America failed these children. We failed the students and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, just as we failed students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a decade ago.
The gunman may solely be responsible for firing the bullets that shattered bodies in these and other schools, but we supplied the tools and the vulnerable target.
More than half of our country believes that this price — dead bodies in elementary schools, teachers’ lives cut short trying to protect children, lost lives in grocery stores, stray bullets that hit sleeping babies — is worth the freedom to own almost any gun and ammunition desired.
The Denver Post editorial board does not hold that belief.
On the contrary, we support an abundance of simple regulations that would pass constitutional scrutiny, prevent mass shootings and reduce casualties when shootings occur. These policies are simple and popular and should be bipartisan: Impose mandatory waiting times, require gun safety training and much more rigorous background checks, regulate ammunition sales and gun features. This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor would it be true that any politician should require all of these to be part of a bill.
Legislation at the state and federal levels reasonably restricting what type of “arms” Americans can “bear” and more specifically which Americans should be barred from bearing any arms is fully in accordance with past rulings of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled in 2008, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that reasonable restrictions on firearms were constitutional. The case built upon United States vs. Miller, a ruling that found a ban on sawed-off shotguns to be constitutional.
“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority, in an opinion that was long overdue. “We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’ ”
Unless the new court veers dramatically from these precedents — as a majority of justices seem likely to do with Roe vs. Wade — it would be prudent for lawmakers to operate under the assumption that this is the test for reasonable restrictions on weapons in this country. If the new conservative majority of the Supreme Court wishes once again to show disdain for precedent and the rulings of their predecessors, we should give them the room they need to expose their politically driven rulings.
Tragically, Congress allowed a ban on semi-automatic rifles with certain features to expire. Millions of these deadly weapons have been sold, making it likely that a court would struggle to find that these guns are not in common use. But we think restrictions on the features of these guns would withstand the Heller/miller test. Shotguns cannot be outlawed but sawing off the barrel makes the gun an entirely different tool. At a minimum, semi-automatic rifles should be required to have a permanently affixed magazine, like a cylinder in a revolver, that must be reloaded one bullet at a time.
Neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court stands in the way of life-saving restrictions on guns and ammunition. Men and women who serve this country in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate are the only impediments to protecting our children.