Flawed Criticisms Of Gun Rights
By KAREN LEE TORRE
A recent column by Manny Margolis criticizing the Supreme Court’s opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago erroneously argues the absence of a historical basis for the Court’s conclusion that Americans have a fundamental individual right to keep arms for self-defense.
Far from engaging in “revisionist history,” the majority opinions in both McDonald and Heller v. District of Columbia, are loaded with scholarship on that point, with numerous citations to statements of the founders and the drafters of the federal constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Justice Samuel Alito hardly cited and relied only on “Blackstone,” as Margolis suggests. Read the lengthy opinions for yourselves; they are a wonderful history lesson.
Justice Alito’s opinion brilliantly takes apart all of the liberals’ arguments for singling out the Second Amendment for disparate treatment when it comes to applying it to the states, concluding that those who share the liberals’ view “in effect, ask us to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.”
With no history to support them, liberals habitually cite to some tragedy involving a child accidentally killed by a gun. Apart from the irrelevance of such incidents to the issue of constitutional rights, more children die by drowning and accidental poisonings than are killed by a gun in the home. Should we ban backyard pools?
Ban all those chemicals we keep under our kitchen sinks, just because some irresponsible adults permit child access to them? (After all, unlike arms, there is no constitutional right to own Drano.)
Thousands are killed each year by negligent use of motor vehicles. Would you support a state law forcing people to take a bus to work? Mandatory car-pooling? Raise the driving age to 21 because teenagers have too many accidents?
These measures would save many lives, at the cost of everyone else suffering a loss of their liberties.
If someone fails to secure a firearm in the home or elsewhere, does that mean that all other responsible people should have their rights taken from them? But that is exactly what liberals argue for, contrary to the very position they take in respect to other guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
Ignored by liberals are statistics showing that firearms are used defensively 2.5 million times annually, greatly exceeding offensive uses by criminals.
Many more lives are saved by guns for every single life lost by a gun. Indeed, in those states where gun ownership increased and “right to carry” laws enacted, crime and murder rates decreased, thus debunking entirely the very public safety arguments that gun ban proponents make.
Responding to this statistical policy-speak, Justice Alito took occasion to note Chicago’s own statistics revealing that “[its] handgun murder rate has actually increased since the [gun] ban was enacted and that Chicago residents now face one of the highest murder rates in the country and rates of other violent crimes that exceed the average in comparable cities.”
Did the liberals miss that one?
Here’s a better story since liberals like to cite anecdotes in arguing matters of law. Recently, a man strolling through Wooster Square in New Haven was assaulted by a knife-wielding thug who demanded his wallet.
The thug had a bad Second Amendment day. His victim was armed and he shot the thug. But you won’t see liberals talking about those little stories.
Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting in Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567, 569 (9th Cir. 2003) stated: “Tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people.”
Here is what Adolph Hitler said: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.”
Back to Judge Kozinski, who added, “If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.”
‘Nuf said. •
Karen Lee Torre, a New Haven trial lawyer, litigates civil rights issues in the federal courts. Her e-mail address is thimbleislands@sbcglobal.net.
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