This is a column I wrote in 2000 on the Second Amendment, following the Million Mom March against gun violence. I am re-running it today, because of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling yesterday tossing out the Washington DC gun-control ordinance.
I tend to subscribe to a slightly different view than most liberal gun-control activists. I do think there is a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution — given the history of the time, as Eugene Robinson points out today in The Washington Post — but that manufacturers do not necessarily have an unlimited right to manufacture weapons.
Industry should be focus of anti-gun efforts
South Brunswick Post, May 9, 2000/The Cranbury Press, May 10, 2000“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 are few sentences in American history that engender as much passion or confusion as the Second Amendment.
It is a tangled sentence that catches itself on its tenses, obscuring its meaning and making interpretation difficult. Random commas seem to short-circuit the sentence’s flow, splitting what could be a straightforward clause into two, dangling and incomprehensible ones.
Over the years, these 27 words have been used by pro- and anti-gun groups to back up their own interpretations of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when it comes to the right the bear arms, both pointing to different clauses to justify their arguments.
Gun-control advocates — backed by some court decisions — say the right to bear arms is dependent on the existence of the militia, while pro-gun groups view the right to bear arms as sacrosanct in and of itself.
Coverage of Sunday’s Million Mom March for Common Sense Gun Laws did little to clarify the constitutional issue, as images of mothers and kids and mournful speeches decrying the violence were cross-cut with images of a significantly smaller counterdemonstration and impassioned pleas to allow mothers to use their firearms to defend their families. And both sides spoke with a certainty about gun rights that belie the pitfalls we’ve faced in trying to parse through the amendment’s language over the last 208 years.
When all is said and done, however, one thing remains. Our society is drowning in firearms and we need to do something to reduce the number of guns on our streets. However, we also need to be careful that the buckets we choose to bail the water out do not spring their own leaks.
Gun-control advocates have outlined a plan they say will clear our streets of guns: stepping up licensing and imposing waiting periods and background checks on buyers; mandating trigger locks so guns cannot be fired accidentally; limiting the number of guns that can be purchased in a month; restricting sales at gun shows.
All of these proposals will have their impact, but we must be careful not to portray them as a panacea for all that ails us. To do so will make it easier for pro-gun activists to shoot holes in the gun control argument.
The fact is, guns will continue to be a problem on our streets so long as we let the gun manufacturers produce as many guns as they think they can sell, regardless of who the buyer and what use the gun will ultimately have.
A gun has only one purpose: to destroy. All other uses stem from this. They are intimidating because of the implied threat of destruction they carry with them. They are effective when used for hunting because they kill the animals being hunted.
That’s why we need to focus our attention on the gun industry and force it to take responsibility for the dangerous situation it creates in the name of profit.
Activists have been successful in forcing Congress to craft federal regulations changing the way the auto industry conducts its business, resulting in the mandatory installation of seat belts, air bags and other safety equipment and in eliminating led from gasoline and lowering the level of toxic emissions being pumped from exhaust pipes. They’ve been successful in forcing the government to regulate the kinds of construction materials used in houses, including banning asbestos and requiring the use of fire-retardant materials.
There is no reason a similar approach could not work with the weapons industry.
According to Handgun Inc., a major gun-control group, installation of load indicators would show when guns are loaded, magazine disconnect safeties would prevent guns from firing if the ammunition magazine is removed and locking mechanisms would prevent unauthorized users from firing.
The government also could limit the manufacture of weapons that have no “legitimate civilian use,” such as “assault weapons and low quality, easily concealable ‘junk guns,’ or Saturday Night Specials,” and so-called “cop-killer bullets” and “mail-order parts which allow someone to assemble an untraceable gun without a serial number,” the organization says.
“Because firearms are often used in crime, it is incumbent on gun manufacturers to constantly evaluate the risks to public health and safety of the products they design,” the organization says. “The industry must stop supplying the market with guns which are attractive to criminals and which have no legitimate civilian use.”
Finally, the makers of guns need to stand up and accept responsibility for risks they create. That means facing litigation and paying damages.
We can’t keep fighting over the meaning of a badly worded amendment. But we can — and should — take steps to staunch the flow of firearms by turning off the spigot.
Hank Kalet 
Excuse me. \”… which have no legitimate civilian use.\”The Dead Old White Guys wanted you to have a gun so that you could exercise the ultimate restraint on the Government thugs.Sorry to be crass, blunt, or just down right hard. But, liberals, such as yourself, seem to forget history. You need that \”V8 thunk\”.A Jew being marched to the gas chamber. Cambodia\’s killing fields. Stalin\’s purges of the farmers. Mao leaping forward of the bodies of those who got in the way. Rawanda, Somalia, … and on and on!When the populace is disarmed; genocide follows. So imagine 1930\’s Germany, with the first armed Jew in his apartment being extracted by a Nazi storm trooper, he gets only the first one coming in the door. He and his family are killed, but they were dead anyway. BUT, who\’s going to be the first storm trooper through the next door. If every Jewish family had a gun and used it, the Nazi\’s would have rapidly run out of storm troopers. That\’s what the Dead Old White Guys were trying to give posterity. The ultimate check on government!\”legitimate civilian use\” is anything you can use to kill that government thug coming to take you to the death camps.Don\’t say it can\’t happen here. It has. Look at the militarization of police, the Waco disaster, Ruby Ridge, the Japanese Internment, and on and on.I really hope you never have the experience of being on the wrong side of this example. I may be, but \”… when they pry it from my cold dead hand!\”
The manufacturers of automobiles and swimming pools make products that kill far more Americans in any given year than do guns. (You can check this on the CDEC\’s website). And what about motorcycles? Yamaha, Suzuki and Harley-Davidson\’s motorbikes kill and injure more Americans than do guns; when you compare the rate per machine, the stats are even more slanted in favor of two wheels and an engine being more deadly than a trigger, chamber and barrel. But the most fundamental flaw is your presumption that the individual right to own guns does not imply a right to manufacture them. Let\’s move it closer to home — does my right to a free press include the right to publish a newpaper as well as to read one? Of course it does; and when it comes to freedom of religion, I can preach or start my own faith (hello, L. Ron Hubbard) just as freely as I can attend services. Sorry, Hank, you\’re wrong. Just own up to to your deep and abiding of your fellowman unless he is leashed and controlled; you\’ll feel all better for facing to it. Or not. Oh, well. The citizenry are still free anyhow.
Stupid regressive gun freaks are still whining that liberals want to take their guns, that liberals want to ban guns. What a damn lie, red herring, straw man and bogus smoke screen. The Supreme Court ruled in your favor, so stop whining like little babies, geeze. Comparing guns to pools or automobiles is moronic. Pools and automobiles are not designed to kill or maim people. Guns are designed to kill, disable or wound. We are told by the gun morons that 30,000 people killed by guns per year is nothing, more people are killed by cars, so just shut up, do nothing and ignore this horrible gun problem in our country. The 2nd amendment doesn\’t give you the right to be an irresponsible fool or moron with your guns, such as firing off your gun into the air from your patio or firing off a gun in a crowded movie theater. This stupid garbage crap about why we have the 2nd amendment or the reason often given by all the right wing clowns: to counter the power of a tyrannical government. We are not lacking for guns, we have what (?), about 200,000,000 or more guns floating around this country and it didn\’t stop Bush from waging a war based on lies. So all those guns were worthless. However, I would be against a violent overthrow of the government. I want to see these gun jerks stand up to the full force of the US military. The trouble with the gun jerks is that too many of them are at heart fascists and would gladly welcome an authoritarian fascistic government that would round up and kill liberals. If a right wing pro-corporate tyrant takes over our country, most of the NRA types would be quite happy with said tyrant. The gun jerks would be the first to cheer such an event. So many of these gun lovers have approved of Bush\’s Iraq debacle, warrantless wiretapping, torture and the trashing of habeas corpus. The Weimar Republic enacted very strict and draconian gun laws because of all the wacked out right wing private armies prevalent in Germany at that time. This was many years before Hitler came to power. Hitler really didn\’t have to confiscate any guns since most of them had already been banned. Toward the end of Hitler\’s regime, he handed out all kinds of weapons to the populace, even to young kids in the so called Wolf Packs. I thought all the right wingers were for home rule and state\’s rights. Shouldn\’t Washington, DC have the right to decide what rules it wants in regards to hand guns? It did not ban all guns in any case. I am not for banning all guns. If the USA should ever be taken over by the pathological libertarian cult I would want a gun to protect myself from the libertarian crazies. Guns don\’t kill people, bullets do. Ban the bullets. Just kidding about the bullets. Gun owners should be fingerprinted, licensed and registered and I am not kidding about that. That does not violate the 2nd amendment. Even Scalia admits that gun ownership is not an absolute right and that restrictions are not unconstitutional. However, I feel that it should be up to the states and the local municipalities what laws and restrictions they want regarding guns.
The Firearms Policy Journal (January 1997) writes: \”The Nazi Party did not ride to power confiscating guns. They rode to power on the inability of the Weimar Republic to confiscate their guns. They did not consolidate their power confiscating guns either. There is no historical evidence that Nazis ever went door to door in Germany confiscating guns. The Germans had a fetish about paperwork and documented everything. These searches and confiscations would have been carefully recorded. If the documents are there, let them be presented as evidence.\” On April 12, 1928, five years before Hitler seized power, Germany passed the Law on Firearms and Ammunition. This law substantially tightened restrictions on gun ownership in an effort to curb street violence between Nazis and Communists. The law was ineffectual and poorly enforced. It was not until March 18, 1938 — five years after Hitler came to power — that the Nazis passed the German Weapons Law, their first known change in the firearm code. And this law actually relaxed restrictions on citizen firearms.MARTIN DYCKMANSt Petersburg TimesPublished November 16, 2003Democracies aren\’t subverted overnight. They die of the cumulative effect of a thousand cuts. Always, some external danger is the pretext for the destruction within.What is most troubling about HB 155 is the phony history the \”whereas\” clauses cite as a pretext for criminalizing the keeping of lists. Supposedly, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler both used gun registration \”to confiscate firearms and render the disarmed population helpless. . . .\”Historians whom I consulted scoff at this. According to Dr. Cristoph Strupp of the German Historical Institute in Washington, Hitler actually liberalized Germany\’s gun laws, except for Jews and other \”enemies of the state.\” But, he added, it would be \”basically naive\” and \”a-historical\” to think that owning guns \”would have made any difference in their fate.\”\”There was virtually no resistance in Germany not because there weren\’t guns but because there was no will to resist,\” explained Dr. Nathan Stolzfus, an associate professor of history at Florida State University. \”The clear majority in Germany received Hitler as he presented himself. . . .\” Dr. Louis A. Perez, a University of North Carolina professor of history who formerly taught at the University of South Florida, said that upon seizing power Castro actually distributed guns to the Cuban population, reversing course only when street crime became a problem.If guns are ever confiscated in America, it will happen only long after we have surrendered other freedoms, as willingly as the Germans did, on some false altar of national security. And once again, it would be too late for guns to make a difference.
Myth :\”All gun control efforts will lead to a total ban on guns.\” Wrong! The vast majority of gun control legislation being proposed in this country has nothing to do with banning guns of any kind. Gun control opponents contrived this lie to manufacture a \”They\’re coming to take our guns away!\” hysteria. Did licensing of drivers and registration of cars lead to a ban on automobiles? Did licensing of dogs lead to a ban on pet ownership? Like myself, the vast majority of people who support gun control oppose an outright ban on all guns. MYTH: \”Israel and Switzerland have very high rates of gun ownership and they don\’t have our crime problems. This proves that guns are not the problem and gun control is not the answer.\” In fact, both Switzerland and Israel have much stricter gun control laws than the United States. All men in Switzerland are members of the militia and issued rifles by the government and these rifles are all registered and all ammunition must be accounted for. When it comes to handguns, the Swiss require a background check, a permit to purchase a handgun, and handgun registration. Apparently, Swiss gun owners don\’t consider this an infringement on their right to own a gun. Israel requires a license to carry, possess or buy a handgun and they conduct thorough background checks, including personal interviews.
The idea that the citizenry could take on the US military by using handguns is wrong on so many levels. Most important, I think, is this: the only way the Second Amendment would be used to oppose tyranny is if we failed to use the First Amendment, and all the rest of the rights and obligations of the constitution. Here’s my gripe with many Second Amendment fundamentalists: they’re trigger happy. They focus on using violence instead of debate, political organizing and the rule of law.The scenarios they put forward to justify violence are the same ones used by supporters of torture. And look how well that worked.My own feeling is that if it comes to the point where a people have to turn weapons on their government in order to protect their rigths, IT IS ALREADY too late.To have arrived at the point means failure and I do not see how an orgy of violence will address that failure.With modern technologies a Government can do far more to restrict a peoples rights then bring arms to bear against them. They can close down access to the banks, to money. They can shut down food supplies and water. They can monitor and imprison your friends for merely speaking to you.America is already an armed to the teeth populace and that has done absolutely nothing to defend their civil liberties against the US Government.Being an armed populace did NOT work.
These phoney baloney libertarians say they are against big government and frivolous law suits. They say they are against wasting our tax dollars and the theft of our tax dollars. They say they are for tort reform and for home rule over the big fed government. But oh boy, they won\’t allow DC to decide how they want to regulate hand guns, they run to big government and the Supreme Court for help in quashing home rule. Our tax dollars STOLEN and wasted because pro gun fools want everyone to be armed. What hypocrites. And now the NRA is going to file law suits all over the country to force local municipalities to change their gun regs. The NRA suits will force cities and municipalities to use up tax dollars in frivolous law suits. That is a real theft of tax dollars. What happened to tort reform? What happened to states\’ rights? Phoney right wingers run to big government so they can get their way and have even more guns. As if we don\’t have enough guns all over the map. I am not for banning guns, so you can stuff that straw man up your butt cheeks.