Another massacre of innocent victims by an armed assailant. Another parade of Republican politicians declaring dispassionately, despite mounting statistical evidence, that changing gun laws won’t prevent other massacres. For a party so ideologically devoted to the preservation of unborn infants’ lives, this jarring disregard for the lives of victims of gun violence is difficult to digest.
Various rights are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, but none of them can claim precedence over the “unalienable rights” spelled out in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How, we might ask these politicians, can the right to own a gun outrank the right of thousands of Americans each year to live their lives, to enjoy liberty and to pursue happiness? How did the right wing’s moral priorities get so twisted?
The missing element in the conservatives’ NRA-inspired concept of the Second Amendment is the notion that every right carries certain responsibilities, and if too many people disregard or abuse those responsibilities, the inevitable result is the loss of that right for everyone. Take air travel as an example. Surely all of us miss the freedom we used to enjoy of walking into an airport and then onto an airplane without being half-undressed, X-rayed and having our private belongings scrutinized. But after enough people abused the responsibilities associated with this right, we all lost it. And after 9/11, very few of us would eagerly go back to the days of nonexistent security at airports.
The tragedy of 2001 took the lives of 2,977 innocent victims. It completely changed our country and many of our rights in an irrevocable way. Yet every year, guns in America take more than 10 times that many lives, many of them through suicide. Over 100,000 people are shot in America every year. Between 2000 and 2010, 335,609 Americans were killed by guns. That is more than the entire population of Cincinnati. And somehow one political party in this country construes this as normal or at least unavoidable. Apparently it is also acceptable. The right to bear arms outweighs every other right, including the right to live.
But the numbers alone should tell us that many Americans have deserted the responsibility attached to the right to bear arms; we as a people deserve to lose this right. We are a violent people compared with, say, our European friends. We wipe out the equivalent of Cincinnati every 10 years. We are paralyzed by a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.
From the Second Amendment: “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.”
The right to keep and bear arms in America is a conditional right, fully contingent on the need of the states to have a well-regulated militia. It does not grant citizens the unconditional right to own guns for any other reason — at least not until 2008, when a conservative Supreme Court turned 200 years of constitutional understanding on its head.
This amendment is an 18th-century law framed for 18th-century circumstances — specifically, that the state generally didn’t provide arms for its militia members, so the militia members would need to provide their own. Even so, those militias were to be “well regulated.” Certainly, if the Framers had seen our day, they would have written more restrictions into the Constitution. But since they didn’t, it is up to us to turn a deaf ear to the illogical arguments of the NRA and its minions and treat this ongoing and horrific catastrophe not with cowardly resignation and lame excuses, but with a determination to restrict this lesser right so we may preserve a greater one — at least until we can learn to live more responsibly.
Roger Terry is a writer and editor living in Orem.