Constitution Worship & Guns
Oh, I already know this one isn’t going to be popular. But I want to throw something out there: it is possible that the Constitution wasn’t necessarily written with the 21st Century in mind.
I say this as I watch the Kagan confirmation hearings and see that the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ownership ban in Chicago for being unconstitutional, in direct violation of the 2nd Amendment. And as much respect as I have for the Constitution as an excellent document to found the government on, I think we’re WAY too far down the line to think that a 200 year old document can’t possibly have been improved upon in the past two centuries of our country’s existence.
The constitution has been amended before (as you all know) with first the 10 Bill of Rights Amendments (signed in with the original Constitution), and then the 17 amendments that have spanned the 200 years since then. The constitution, therefore, was immediately recognized to not be infallible by the founders. That’s the point of allowing Amendments. The idea that it is this untouchable document is ridiculous, and it doesn’t allow us to adjust our government to changes in our society.
If you can go along with this, that means two things: First of all, the interpretation of the constitution as the founders meant it is anachronistic, and two, we SHOULD BE ABLE TO CHANGE EVEN THE BILL OF RIGHTS. (Commence NRA getting on my ass).
The text of the 2nd Amendment is this:
“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.”
Nowadays, militias are relatively rare, and tend to be backwoods fringe groups. Our enemies do not really have the ability to invade us, so militias are kind of not necessary anymore (I will be eating these words come the zombie apocalypse). This isn’t to say we should ban gun ownership outright, but seriously, why do you need a gun in the cities? Give it to the police officers and a few to those in the countrysides – those who hunt – and you’re in a better place.
The argument always thrown out is that guns are for protection, and this is frankly just not supported by looking around the globe. All of Europe has much stricter gun control laws, and the amount of gun deaths in all of those countries is drastically lower. The numbers I could find were from 2000, so I apologize for these statistics being slightly out-of-date, but the UK in 2000 had .12 gun deaths out of every 100,000 people in the country. In Spain, it was .25, in Germany .5, in Macedonia 1.28. In the United States? 3. This doesn’t necessarily prove causation (I don’t have time to do that and you can find people who will try elsewhere), but the fact is, there just isn’t a correlation between looser restrictions on gun laws and a drop in gun deaths.
Point being: this Amendment is no longer useful. And the idea that this is a slippery slope to taking away the other freedoms I just don’t buy. I know to use this analogy is to lose, but it seems to be the one that is pulled out the most, so I’ll make a quick historical point: Hitler really didn’t roll down a slippery slope, people. He came in on a wave of popular support, explicitly stated his hatred for the Jews, burned down the Reichstag, and then started taking over Europe. It was hard to miss what he was trying to do.
Really, I think we just need to rethink how we look at our Constitution. Great? Yes. Perfect? No. It came from the guys who though slaves were okay and only counted as 3/5ths of a person during the census. These weren’t Gods on High, they were men just like us. And really, that should be comforting, not alarming.