"The right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT be infringed"
Posted by: tony on 07/02/2008 08:19 PM
Updated by: tony on 07/03/2008 01:50 AM
Expires: 08/02/2008 12:00 AM
So spake the Supreme Court of the United States of America with regards to the unconstitutional total ban on handguns in Washington, DC.
Anyone who has even scratched the surface of my blog writings can probably figure out my opinion of this ruling. However, the most liberal Vox Novista, Morning's Minion, holds the opposite view, and he believes he has the backing of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
He starts out with...
The US Supreme Court has declared the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns to be unconstitutional as it violates the so called individual "right to bear arms". We need to unpack this. The Catholic perspective is to start with Aquinas, who viewed law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community". The Enlightenment era gave us another view of the law, predicated on the notion of individual liberty as the foundation of society. In other words, the person has to right to do as they wish in search of personal fulfilment, as long as it does not impinge upon the rights of another. Law is then all about the enforcement of social contracts.
And with this, I am in total agreement. If I own a handgun and keep it in my home, I don't infringe on anyone else's rights. If I carry a handgun, concealed on my person, I don't infringe on anyone else's rights. When I talk about rights, I'm referring to those endowed by our Creator, namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I'm not talking about some of the "rights" that Morning's Minion's ideological compatriots espouse, like the "right to not be offended", the "right to have their irrational fears mollycoddled" or the "right to be totally safe no matter how stupid you are".
The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies that we are adults who understand that with these rights come responsibilities. One of the responsibilities is not to infringe on others' rights while pursuing your own.
It would be erroneous not to credit the Enlightenment with its achievements. Too often, rulers abused the notion of "common good" (if they even bothered to seek a rationale) to trample upon human rights and human dignity. In re-discovering and liberating this essential Catholic teaching, we must be grateful to "Enlightenment values". But we cannot go too far, for the underlying anthropology is false. It is used to support laissez-faire liberalism, based on the notion that market exchange is a "free" exchange that reflects natural differences in the various actors. This approach as been condemned vociferously by the Church from Pope Leo XIII onwards, for the Church looks at these issues through the lens of the common good, the way Aquinas viewed the law. The ethic of private liberty has led directly to gay marriage, where the goal is simply the satisfaction of personal desires as opposed to the common good which would emphasize the bearing and rearing of children. And of course abortion is justified in this manner: the "right to privacy" is paramount, and the unborn simply cannot be active participants in a social contract.
And this describes what happens when desires are enumerated as rights. You end up with the "right" to marry the "being of your choice", the "right" to kill your unborn child for the sake of convenience or the "right" to deny food and water to an inconvenient "born" person who is ill and unresponsive.
This is a rather lengthy introduction, but, I believe, an essential one. For the right to bear arms that the Supreme Court upheld today comes directly from this notion of personal liberty trumping the common good. For the authorities charged with the common good in DC, an area suffering from extremely high gun-related violence, felt that a ban on handguns was appropriate. Of course, this ban can have limited effect absent border controls at the Potomac river. But is this a valid argument for inaction? To use that logic, the ability to travel means that no laws restricting abortion should be enacted either.
This is the result of an enumerated Constitutional right trumping an erroneously defined "common good". DC is an area of extremely high gun related violence. This doesn't come from an inordinate number of guns, it comes from an inordinate number of criminals. We don't need more gun control, we need more criminal control. The NRA is foursquare behind this movment including increased jail terms for the use of guns in the commission of a crime.
At this stage, it is useful to see what the Church teaches on this matter. Here are some statements from the USCCB:
"Since such a significant number of violent offenses are committed with handguns and within families, we believe that handguns need to be effectively controlled and eventually eliminated from our society. We acknowledge that controlling the possession of handguns will not eliminate gun violence, but we believe it is an indispensable element of any serious or rational approach to the problem....
We believe that only prohibition of the importation, manufacture, sale, possession and use of handguns (with reasonable exceptions made for the police military, security guards and pistol clubs where guns would be kept on the premises under secure conditions) will provide a comprehensive response to handgun violence."
That is quite clear. We need a national ban on handguns. I would like the many Catholics who are cheering this ruling to explain why they so gleefully go against the bishops on this one. For this ruling really pits the two alternative approaches to law against each other. Do we go with personal liberty, which includes the right to own handguns for self-defense? Or do we go with the common good, in an atmosphere of out-of-control gun death? I stand with the Church on this one, and deem the Supreme Court decision quite shameful, rooted as it is in the kind of reasoning that gave us Roe v. Wade and gay marriage.
In Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration, the bishops reiterated their support for legislative efforts that seek to protect society from the violence associated with easy access to deadly weapons. "As bishops, we support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children and anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns."
"Sensible regulation of handguns". I'd imagine Morning's Minion and I would differ as to what constitutes sensible. It would also vary wildly from state to state and community to community. That's what a comprehensive federal "anything" makes no sense in this case.
And as far as "out of control gun death", DC has that with the ban in place. Also, if you make even a cursory investigation into gun death statistics, you'll find that the murder rates are the highest where guns are the most regulated. If banning guns isn't working, I guess the solution is to ban them more. Well, that's the liberal solution and is also the definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result".
Scalia’s history lesson is also misplaced. First, he appeals very much to the Enlightenment-era philosophy that was prevalent when the constitution was written. Just because the "founders" believed it does not believe it is right.
It is a right because the founders (without the sneer quotes) enumerated it specifically in the Bill of RIGHTS.
And anyway, as I noted, you can draw a direct line from this position to Roe v. Wade.
Actually, you can't. Nowhere in the Constitution is a "right to privacy" or a "right to abortion". Directly in the Bill of Rights is the "right of the people to keep and bear arms".
Second, he forgets that public policy geared to the common good differs by age. A simple example: it would not be possible to achieve universal health care during this middle ages, so there is no duty to try. You know where I am going with this. Scalia's attempts to freeze-frame jurisprudence in the late-18th century is quite at odds with the notion of law promoting the common good. Then again, his is a sola-scriptura approach to textual analysis.
The Constituion is a recipe book for the greatest experiment in self governance. It is designed to be followed exactly. If times have changes, and the Second Amendment no longer makes sense, then repeal it. The mechanism is in place to do so. Get two thirds of the states to ratify it and it's a done deal. Problem is, Morning's Minion doesn't like the idea of the people's representatives deciding what "the common good" is. He's more comfortable with elitist judges doing it. He doesn't like a hard and fast "Constitutional cookbook" he likes one more flexible to his own taste, much like that reprehensible "spirit" of Vatican II.
FInally, the empirical question. Let me point out for a start that the rest of the developed world views the United States as extreme and insane in its approach to guns. When gun homicide and suicide rates are off the charts, the American defenders to the pseudo-right shrug their shoulders and claim that banning guns would not solve anything. It's just that, well, the United States is just more violent than elsewhere. Nonsense on stilts.
I don't much give a tinker's damn about what the rest of the world thinks. People are getting killed in places like DC precisely because of the banning of firearms. DC, Virginia Tech, the LIRR with their gun free policies turn themselves into "sheep pens" ripe for the slaughter. Gun violence will be curbed when criminals fear the armed citizen more than the police. If everyone had the right to carry a firearm concealed, and any "sheep" on the street could be packing "teeth", then the smarter criminals would find a safer line of work, and the stupider ones would be "Darwined" out of the gene pool.
According to the extensive research of David Hemenway from Harvard’s School of Public Health, the US is actually not that exceptionally violent, at least among other high-income, industrialized nations. Crimes like assault, car theft, burglary, robbery, and sexual incidents are not particularly high by OECD standards. What differs about the US is "lethal violence". So while guns don’t induce people to commit crimes, they make crimes lethal. The international evidence is beyond dispute: the availability of guns leads to greater rates of homicide and suicide, and no offset in terms of lower non-gun murders. We are talking here about a primary component of the culture of death.[ed.- Emphesis, mine]
So Morning's Minion makes my point for me. Criminals are committing crimes with guns. New gun laws are making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to own guns. Criminals are not affected by gun laws (even existing ones which are many times not enforced). So the net effect of new gun laws on the number of guns in the hands of criminals is zero, zip, nada. However, the carrying of weapons by responsible citizens have a huge effect on the crime rate. Municipalities which have enacted required gun ownership ordinance have seen an 85% reduction in violent crime. And this is all violent crime, not just gun crime.
I’ve even tried to do a simple empirical study on this blog, looking at cross-country gun ownership and homicide rates. I found that gun ownership rate are positively and significantly related to homicide and suicide rates across 19 advanced economies, and that a bevy of other factors — GDP per capita, demographics, ethnic divisions, urbanization and inequality– did not seem to matter on their own. It’s the guns, stupid! What causes gun deaths is the availability of guns. Score one for Occam’s razor. I did a little further analysis, to see if the availability of guns enhanced the underlying factors that might cause violence. It does. Introducing a non-linear element in the regression suggests that gun ownership is especially detrimental when ethnic divisions and inequality are elevated. Does that sound like any country you know?
This is unadulterated bullsh*t. What wasn't broken out was the rates of gun ownership among law abiding citizens. This makes any study flawed. Of course increased gun ownership among murderers would increase the murder rate.
The other argument often touted in that many gun-owning communities are inherently peaceful, and that the problems are localized to a few inner-city areas. Even if that were true, what happened to the notion of solidarity? What happened to the common good? Ah, I forgot, individual liberty matters more. Silly me.
I have plenty of solidarity with my inner city brethern. I want them to have the exact same rights and opportunity to defend themselves that I have. I would like to see them able to own and carry a handgun, and have numerous places to target shoot, be trained and build their proficiendcy and confidence.
In these peaceful places, you will probably find that guns are a way of life. Children are taught to shoot and hunt at a young age. Also, in many of these places where they cling to their guns (to quote Barack Obama) they also cling to their Bibles and their Christian faith.
Why don't we play Morning's Minion's fantasy scenario out to the conclusion he seems to want.
In 2008, King Morning's Minion waved his magic wand and all handguns magically disappeared. Now citizens everywhere no longer fear being murdered by a handgun.
However, there appears to be a jump in assaults by big men on small men, and a jump in assaults and rapes by big men on women. It seems that criminals no longer fear armed citizens, so they are assaulting people with knives, chains, clubs and their bare fists.
A large man can easily kill a woman with his bare hands. Women are smaller and substantially weaker in their upper body than men. God gave us different sizes and physical abilities. Samuel Colt made us equal again.
