A new post?...YUP

I know I know...it's been a long time. But I recently saw a discussion over the Supreme Court's recent decision to guarantee the right of every individual to own firearms and my head almost exploded. It was time for a Boring Political Diatribe.

In case you haven't heard, the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, made a major decision about the 2nd Amendment. Since its passage in 1791, there had never been a clarification by the supreme court of its meaning...until now. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Scalia, the court argued that the amendment's phrasing protected all law-abiding citizens to own weapons for both hunting and self-defense.

So...where to start? For me, the entire situation could not be more ridiculous. And it's part of a bigger problem with our national dialogue. See, since the 1980s (and slightly earlier going back to the 1960s), conservatives have been obsessed with the idea of strict constructionism: the idea that the law of the land should be derived strictly from the constitution. This was a way of trying to undermine the liberal decisions of the Warren Court (which gave us such horrible things as Brown v. Board, the ending of miscegenation laws, and the right to use birth control) because many of those decisions had taken some liberties with strict interpretations of the constitution. So, the movement towards strict constructivism was an attempt to persuade voters that conservative principles were more in line with the ideas of our honored founding fathers, and thus more righteous.

At this point I should mention two things:

One, why we should care about what our founding fathers meant or even if we can is completely mysterious to me. No other country in the world is obsessed with this sort of thing, it is quite strange. Our founding fathers were not geniuses, they made plenty of mistakes, many within our Constitution. Some have been rectified (slavery anyone?) and some haven't (our ridiculous electoral system for one). Additionally, the constitutional convention was attended by 55 delegates. How could we possibly read into the thoughts and minds of 55 people? And of course, everything in the constitution was a compromise, so it is possible that no one fully agreed with any of the wording of the constitution. For me, trying to strictly interpret the constitution based on what we think people in the late 18th century were thinking is just beyond crazy.
And two, many of the conservative attempts to strictly interpret the constitution, just fail on the most basic accounts of common sense. In other words, to say that the interpretation is a strict understanding of the Constitution is either lying or just plain crazy. Coming to these conclusions takes quite a lot of intellectual acrobatics. For example, the 2nd amendment reads:"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." As some quick background, the reason this amendment was approved was because it addressed a major issue from the Revolution. Leading up to the revolution, the British had forbid the colonial militias from carrying arms because they feared insurrection. Not surprisingly, the recent revolutionaries were so outraged by this infringement that they put a law in their new constitution protecting militia's rights to carry arms. Of course, they didn't really think this through: the British outlawed these guns because they rightly feared a rebellion against the government. It was not as if outlawing guns precipitated the revolution, it was just a normal reaction by the British to the coming of a rebellion. To include this amendment in the bill of rights was just to stick it to the British: to show them that Americans were better because they were going to preserve those rights. But no government believes itself to be illegitimate; to allow citizens to arm themselves against the government in a democracy is a recipe for disaster and probably some sort of dictatorial takeover. Honestly, the founding fathers never really thought this one through.
So that is the real background to the 2nd amendment. Notice that it only applies to militias (by the way, soon after, the militias were incorporated into what we now call the national guard). Now, I guess one could argue that the writers of this amendment would not even have imagined a scenario where guns would be outlawed amongst the general populace. For many people of the time guns were used to secure food, so it would have been inconceivable that the government would actually outlaw them. But still, a strict interpretation would affirm only that militias have a right to bear arms. That the founders didn't think about it only affirms my point that we shouldn't look back on them for guidance. Still, conservatives argue that the 2nd amendment is a promise to the American people that they have the right to have guns. How they derive this is a mystery to me: there is no such promise, the amendment specifically protects a militias rights to own guns and the reason it does so is because militias challenge the government. As with all the amendments in the bill of rights, central government's power is challenged and state's rights are preserved. A more open interpretation would only grant that the 2nd amendment gives people the right to have guns only in terms of resistance to the government (ironically, a position that even the NRA finds hard to defend). It makes no mention in any way to the right to own guns for self-protection.

But what really set me off was a comment by a conservative pundit who claimed that finally the Supreme Court had stepped in to preserve the rights granted to us in our constitution and had showed those winy gun-restricting liberals a thing or two, as if this was some sort of major constitutional crisis between the powers of government and the powers of the people. In reality, the entire gun control debate is about mobilizing blue-collar voters against the "elitist" Democratic Party. It has no other purpose. As some brief history: "liberals" and the government had no interest in restricting guns until 1920s (with the exception of 1790s when George Washington confiscated the guns of those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, thus showing that to allow rebellious groups to have guns in the name of overthrowing the government is just plain crazy anyhow) when gangsters started going on killing sprees in urban environments with automatic Tommy Guns. Thus, in 1934, the National Firearms Act outlawed automatic weapons. There was no major protest. In 1938, the U.S. government began regulation of domestic arms sales under the interstate commerce clause, which would eventually lead to the setting up of the ATF. Still no protest. In 1968, in response to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the government began to register gun owners and disallow certain felons and those with a history of mental illness from owning guns. Still, no major protest, although the NRA shifted its emphasis from a gun-club, to a political organization trying to influence legislation to ensure that gun owners were respected and did not have to pay for expensive permits, etc. In 1986, the Law Enforcement Protection Act was passed that outlawed armor piercing "cop-killing" bullets. Still, no protest, but also in that year the NRA pushed for a Firearms Owner's Protection Act that streamlined the process to gun ownership, but also created heavier restrictions for those involved in armed crimes.

But then came 1994. In 1994, Bill Clinton pushed for two laws: The Brady Bill which forced anyone buying a gun to go through a 5-day waiting period in order to administer a background check and what would be called the "Assault Weapons Ban," which banned semi-automatic weapons. Now the protests started. The NRA was not happy with this bill, they had become accustomed to 12 years of working with Republican administrations and they were being shut out of the process. But more importantly, Republican strategists believed they could use this issue to split blue-collar Democrats and push swing voters into the Republican camp. They painted Clinton, Democrats, and liberals as elitists who didn't understand the importance of guns to many rural families. They claimed that these liberals looked down upon those that owned guns. They claimed that liberals were the ones trying to take away their tradition of gun ownership and hunting. Of course this was psychological warfare. The Republicans were playing on the minds of many Americans who owned guns who were feeling ostracized not by liberals, but by society for owning guns. Many of these swing voters were traditionalists and in an era of rapid change, such traditionalists are logically going to feel uneasy and insecure. Republicans were able to channel these insecurities and direct it against Democrats. Nevermind that the laws did almost nothing to most gun-owners or that repeal of those laws would lead to much higher crime rates in urban areas. Clinton and the Democrats were the bad guys. Not surprisingly, the elections in 1994 were a complete disaster for the Democrats on a surprising scale. The gun issue was cited by many voters in swing states and areas as why they came and voted Republican. The Republicans gained 62 seats in Congress, gained the Senate and the Congress back (the Republican Party had not held the Congress since 1954).

Since then, the Democrats have basically given up on Gun Control. They have bigger fights to fight, I suppose. But Republicans have continued to use this issue to wedge normally Democratic voters from the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court ruling was the culmination of this mobilized outrage and is not based on any reasonable interpretation of the constitution or any interest in reasonable government administration.