After a second mass shooting in the space of a week, a friend noted that only one amendment in the Bill of Rights began with the words “Congress shall make no law.”
“It’s not the Second Amendment,” he said.
Of course, that doesn’t deter gun rights advocates like Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming.
“Every time that there’s an incident like this, the people who don’t want to protect the Second Amendment use it as an excuse to further erode Second Amendment rights,” she said.
She’s not wrong, I guess. Many Americans see mass shootings like those in Georgia and Colorado, and they cry out for their leaders to do something, anything, to make the carnage stop.
Vice President Kamala Harris accused folks like Lummis of setting up a false choice.
“This is not about getting rid of the Second Amendment,” Harris said during an appearance on “CBS This Morning.” “It’s simply about saying we need reasonable gun safety laws.”
Both she and President Joe Biden have spoken out in support of such reform.
“The point here is Congress needs to act,” Harris said during that CBS interview. “On the House side, they did. There are two bills which the president is prepared to sign, and so we need the Senate to act.”
Biden also urged Congress to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that had been in effect for 10 years in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“There is no reason why we have assault weapons on the streets of a civil society,” Harris said. “They are weapons of war.”
Reform advocates have public opinion on their side.
A Gallup survey last fall found that 57% of respondents thought gun regulations should be more strict. That number has been as high as 78% in the early 1990s and as low as 44% in 2010. It was 67% in 2018.
A survey taken this year found 56% of respondents were at least somewhat dissatisfied with the nation’s gun regulations. It found 33% to be very dissatisfied.
Among those wanting a change in the regulations, those wanting stricter rules outnumbered those wanting to ease regulations by a margin of 5 to 1.
Here’s another statistic driving public opinion. A Gallup survey in 2019 found that nearly half of respondents were at least somewhat worried about falling victim to a mass shooting. Roughly one in five admitted to being very worried.
And yet guys like Republican U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana suggest that tightening restrictions to fight gun violence would be like banning sober drivers to fight drunk driving.
This issue hasn’t always been one pitting conservatives against liberals.
Take the example of Warren Burger, former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Burger was in all respects a conservative, but he was no fan of the Second Amendment.
During a 1991 appearance on PBS, the retired chief justice observed that if he had been writing the Bill of Rights in the 1990s, he wouldn’t have included the right to bear arms.
“The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word fraud — on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” he said. “The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”
Sounds like maybe he would have been on the side of the reformers.
Kelly Hawes is a columnist for CNHI newspapers in Indiana. Send comments to [email protected].
Kelly Hawes is a columnist for CNHI newspapers in Indiana. Send comments to [email protected].