Last year the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at military funerals. They cited the 1st Amendment as a rationale and suggested that offensive or unpopular speech is the speech most in need of protection. While I understand that, I disagreed vehemently with the Court as to what the right to Free Speech entails. However, if we are going to agree that the Bill of Rights are just that, Rights, and not privileges then we must except them as they are and not attempt to attach any modern opinions to them, unless of course we are prepared to utilize the methods by which the Constitution can be amended. Unfortunately, too many people are now engaged in rants about the 2nd Amendment and what the Founding Fathers meant by it. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but I am of above average intelligence and can understand the militia argument. I am not going to argue that here, but simply say: the Founding Fathers named it the Bill of Rights and not the Bill of Privileges.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, the Bill of Rights are: “A formal summary of those rights and liberties considered essential to the people”. A privilege is something enjoyed by a person beyond the advantages of most. None of us would want any group enjoying privileges of speech, worship, or assembly not afforded to us all as citizens of the United States. Why then does the 2nd Amendment engender such hostility and parsing of its text? It’s simple. Bad people do bad things to good people with guns. That’s truly what this is all about. That and nothing more. I was at the funeral for LCpl. Snyder when the WBC protested and saw the pain it caused his father. I saw too that pain revisited when the Supreme Court affirmed their right to cause that pain. When I ranted about the unfairness of the verdict I was told by numerous people things to the effect of, “I don’t like it, but it’s the correct verdict. We don’t want to limit WBC only to find ourselves limited when we wish to protest some action of the government and that’s where this would go if we don’t let them protest at funerals, as vile and despicable as they may be.”
I still disagree with that sentiment, but do understand the argument. In his opinion on Schenck vs. United States Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is typically, and inaccurately, quoted, you can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. What he actually said was, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” The difference is that falsely shouting fire is a reasonable restraint on Freedom of Speech. Just as limiting military grade and/or fully automatic weapons from citizens is a reasonable restraint on the Freedom to Keep and Bear Arms. What’s lost in this discussion is the distinction. Military grade does not mean weapons that look like, or bear common attributes with, actual military weapons. An AR-15 is NOT a military grade weapon. An M-16 or LAWS Rocket are. Just because something looks like something does not make it something. You can buy a Chevy Impala, festoon it with NASCAR stickers and paint, but it isn’t Jeff Gordon’s car, nor could it compete on the track.
What this argument truly boils down to is emotion. The emotion of seeing small, innocent kindergarteners riddled with bullets fired by a mad man from a weapon that looks like the one a soldier carries into battle. No one gives a damn if you want to fire a thousand rounds into a stump somewhere out in the woods, but everyone cares when an evil man uses a weapon for nefarious ends, and quite rightly so. Blaming the inanimate object and not the user is the issue. Nowhere in the United States is the speed limit higher than 75 mph, but dozens of models of cars and motorcycles are sold that can easily exceedtwice that limit. Why should we be allowed to purchase a Ferrari that can attain speeds in excess of 180 mph when there is nowhere to legally drive that fast? Simple. Because we have a driver’s license and the money to afford one. There is no difference in kind between the maniac who drives his Ferrari into a busload of children and the maniac who shoots up a classroom, but no one even considers banning cars that can drive that fast.
In 2010, according to the National Highway Traffic safety Administration, 32,885 people were killed in automobile accidents, of those 6,414 were passengers, 4,280 were pedestrians and 618 were pedalcyclists. That means 11,312 people, who were not driving, were killed by cars in 2010. In the same year, 11,015 people were ruled as homicides due to firearms. Those numbers are stunning when you look at them; especially if you consider another 21,000 drivers were killed in those auto accidents. To be fair, in the same year another 19,908 deaths were either firearm related suicides or accidents. Which still begs the question, why not just ban cars? Because that’s nonsensical is why. No rational human being believes the car is to blame when six teenaged girls are killed because the driver was texting while driving. That’s no consolation to the families of the dead girls, but the rest of us say, “What a shame”and forget it the next day.
I am not suggesting anyone should ever forget the sweet angels murdered in Sandy Hook, but I am also not blaming the instrument of their deaths. I blame the man who repeatedly pulled the trigger. No one may need a car that is capable of being driven 200 mph, but we are all capable of owning one and no one, save some environmental loons, would suggest otherwise. The argument, therefore, that no one needs a semi-automatic weapon is not only sophistry and sophomoric when seen in the context of a Ferrari, but completely and utterly wrong to boot. The Founding Fathers feared an intrusive, big government would counter what they had fought and bled to create, so the 2nd Amendment was adopted to guarantee that we would always remain a free state. We can argue back and forth on the language of “a well regulated militia”, but ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” is the salient point. Farmers, longshoremen, bankers and drunks collected their trusty muskets and with some military instruction, a lot of heart and not a little luck, defeated the most powerful army in the world. They did it not with weapons which could only be used for hunting, nor with handguns, nor low caliber weapons. They did it with the most technologically advanced weapon of the day. That weapons are now more technologically advanced, as are cars, has never been the point.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, et al made lofty speeches, wrote lofty tomes and proclaimed lofty ideas about what the United Colonies should be become, but it was the lowly citizen armed with a musket who made those dreams a reality. To this day, members of the United States Army Infantry wear crossed muskets as the symbol of their branch. They don’t wear those muskets to honor the Red Coats who massacred Americans in Boston, nor the husband who murdered his wife, but rather in homage to the men who left their homes to fight for an idea, musket in hand. That idea is who, and what we are. I am not suggesting that some limitations to the Bill of Rights should not be considered and, if after sober thought, adopted. I am saying though that denying good, law abiding people the right to anything because an evil man may make use of it and wreak havoc is simply not who we are as a people. We should make it ever more difficult for criminals or mentally unbalanced people to attain firearms, just as we do with cars, but we should never, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, trade freedom for security. If we do, we are nothing more than a lesser version of the shining city on the hill our founders wanted us to be, and rights will be replaced by privileges, with the American Dream lost.
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