Last week, we experienced another school shooting, this time in Minneapolis, leaving at least two children dead and 14 injured. The shooter had multiple guns, purchased recently and legally.
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 gun control advocates. Gun control advocates inadvertently protect this almost unbelievable gun culture.
I cringe when I see politicians decry the easy availability of guns and then quickly voice their support for individuals’ Second Amendment rights.
I am dismayed by the willingness of anti-gun or pro-gun control people to express their position of protecting dubious rights that did not exist 20 years ago. Let’s go back 20 or so years, 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, which declared individual rights to guns, 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 gave us. They made the laws less strict.
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 overturned the centuries-old understanding of the Second Amendment, establishing that individuals have the right to bear arms.
In the early 1990s, in interviews and an article he wrote in a magazine, former 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. He advocated for strong government regulation of firearms, similar to the regulation of automobiles, to promote public safety. His views reflected the historical consensus that the Second Amendment primarily protected the right to bear arms for militia service, not an individual right to own guns for personal use.
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?
The late former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated for the abolition of the Second Amendment, arguing that its original purpose is no longer relevant in contemporary America. He was on the Court in 2008 and wrote the dissent for the four-vote minority. It rested on four main points. He argued among other things that the Founders would have made the individual right aspect of the Second Amendment express if that was what was intended.
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 overturned precedents and decreed it less than 20 years ago.
