Last week, the U.S. experienced its 566th mass killing this year, with 18 people killed and 13 others wounded in Lewiston, Maine. And like many such killings, the killer used an AR-15 type assault weapon of war. And the killer, known to be mentally ill, possessed this weapon legally. Only in America!
Yes, the ready availability of guns is the primary cause of these murderous rampages. However, unexpected reasons support that availability. One of these is the weak fight by anti-gun (gun control advocates). Gun control advocates inadvertently protect this almost unbelievable gun culture.
I was incensed again last Saturday when I listened to a congressperson being interviewed on television. A part of the interview covered the horrendous mass shooting in Lewiston. In her comments, this liberal Democratic congressperson dutifully decried how easy it was for this shooter to get a weapon of mass destruction. And she predictably criticized politicians, mostly Republicans, for blocking attempts at banning assault weapons. And then I cringed when this congressperson mentioned that she favored protecting individuals’ Second Amendment Rights.
I am dismayed by the easy willingness of anti-gun or pro-gun control people to express their positions of protecting dubious rights that did not exist 20 years ago. Let’s go back 20 or so years ago—to the beginning of this 21st century and compare the fights for gun control and abortion rights.
In 2001, opinion polls showed that 26 percent of Americans favored abortion being legal in all cases, against 15 percent feeling that abortion should be illegal in all cases, with the balance, the overwhelming majority, feeling that abortion should be legal in some instances. Thus, the public was pro-abortion.
Around this same time, in 2003, 60 percent of Americans thought that gun regulation should be stricter compared to only six percent feeling that it should be less strict, with the balance, 34 percent, preferring to leave gun laws as they were. Notably, during 2008, the year of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, 51 percent of the population wanted gun laws to be stricter, with 40 percent preferring that gun laws remain the same. Only eight percent wanted them to be less strict, but that is what the Supreme Court did.
However, the majority opinions of Americans about abortion and gun control were opposed by a minority of Americans who were shifting away from democracy and toward developments that would remake the Supreme Court in their image ideologically.
The opinion written in the Heller decision by the late Justice Scalia flipped the centuries-old understanding of the Second Amendment to individuals having the right to bear arms.
In the early 1990s, in interviews and an article he wrote, conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said the gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was one of the greatest pieces of fraud that he had seen in his lifetime.
The gun-control folks did the appropriate thing and accepted this questionable judgment of the Right-Wing Supreme Court; however, they went too far and “rolled over and played dead,” acting as if they believed that ruling to be correct and appropriate rather than contesting it publicly.
On the other hand, in 2022, the Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion. And the pro-abortion folk did not roll over and play dead. They came out fighting, and the result is that abortion is still legal in some states that would have banned abortions without these fights to protect abortion rights.
Why are the good guys so weak on gun control when most Americans are in favor of gun regulations?
Also, as sociologist Richard Alba writes, “There is a glaring lack of balance in the opinion because Scalia while admitting limits on Second Amendment rights in the abstract, provides no systematic reasoning or principles that might help us establish where the individual’s right to gun ownership ends and the right of the community to live without the constant threat of gun violence begins.”
Liberals and moderates fail society by falling in line with the right-wingers to protect a right that did not exist before this right-wing Court decreed it just 15 years ago.
