About four months ago, Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. You remember the tragedy — but at the same time, you don’t. You remember the facts, the picture of the children evacuating the school, where you were when you heard the news. But you might not remember the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as the terror settled in, the tremor in your voice as you talked about the massacre, the fight to hold back tears. That part you might have forgotten. It’s human nature.
That’s the part that the National Rifle Association wanted you to forget as the Senate debated the recent gun control bill. If the urgency of that day had remained with America and with its senators, the measure might actually have passed. The amendment was modest; its purpose was to mandate background checks for all gun sales. It wouldn’t have done enough, but it would have saved lives. That was too much for the NRA, however, which helped to sink the bill last Wednesday. The pro-gun group claims that virtually any form of gun control is unconstitutional. It would trample, they assert, the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Let us be clear on one point: The Second Amendment does not guarantee private ownership of guns. It ensures that the army — the “well-regulated militia” — will have the right “to keep and bear arms.” That’s it. It’s not confusing or ambiguous or opaque. Between the amendment’s adoption in 1791 and 2008, the Supreme Court did not once seriously question this definition. This includes conservative justices, who dismissed any notion to the contrary as “fraud.” Neither did academics, legal theorists, legislators or presidents. There was no reason to — the amendment’s meaning is obvious.
Only after the rise of the private gun industry in the 1970s and 1980s — and that of its lobbying arm, the NRA — did our judges begin to question this self-evident idea. Politicians got in on the game, using “the right to bear arms” as a wedge issue to win over conservative voters. Then, in 2008, the Supreme Court issued a disastrously misguided opinion affirming 5-4 the right of individual Americans to own handguns. Yet even in that ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion explicitly noted that “reasonable restrictions” on semiautomatic weapons, magazine limits and Americans with a history of crime or mental instability were constitutionally valid.
Still, the deceptions persist. The NRA is an incredibly powerful and well-funded group; the politicians whose election campaigns it finances can’t risk alienating it. And so, the public keeps hearing more about their supposed Second Amendment right to own an AR-15, to buy a gun after committing a felony or to “stand your ground” and shoot anyone they deem to be dangerous. Our legislators might not personally believe in this interpretation, but they do believe in two things: money and votes. For them, the cost of human lives is trumped by the cost of a re-election campaign.
But it’s worth taking a moment to consider these human lives. The NRA won’t. Most politicians won’t. In the end, it falls on us. The gun debate will continue to rage on, but the victims of gun crimes will no longer be heard. Their voices were silenced. Now, we must speak for them.
We don’t have much time to spend with each other. It is the legacy of “gun rights” groups that this already too-brief time has been shortened and shattered for so many families. To pretend that the Constitution condones their twisted crusade is an insult to its founders. In the wake of Newtown, of Aurora, of Virginia Tech and of Columbine, we must be brave about confronting gun violence. The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact; it serves as no impediment to gun control. The real impediment is the cowardice of obstructionist politicians dependent on NRA support. That relationship is the true suicide pact, and it’s killing our country one massacre at a time.
Mark Stern is a senior in the College. This is the final appearance of LETTERS OF THE LAW.
