Guns: Loosening the restrictions

Gun control is on its way out, said David Rittgers in National Review Online. In a landmark ruling last week, the U.S. Supreme Court established that the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” supersedes state and local gun-control laws, and that no community can simply ban handgun ownership outright. The 5–4 ruling, which overturned Chicago’s nearly three-decade-old handgun ban, “is a harbinger for the end of gun prohibition.” Good riddance, because gun control doesn’t work. In Chicago, which had the strictest handgun restrictions in the nation, 258 public school students were shot last year, 32 of them fatally. Meanwhile, in just the past month, three citizens armed with “illegal” handguns used them to defend their homes and businesses from criminals. “Strict gun-control policies have failed to deliver on their essential promise: that denying law-abiding citizens access to the means of self-defense will somehow make them safer.”

Not so fast, said The Economist. In writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito emphasized that the Constitution does not confer “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever,” and that it was perfectly reasonable to bar firearm ownership to felons and the mentally ill, and to ban guns in schools and government buildings. So the gun lobby shouldn’t pop the champagne just yet. As a result of the court’s vague guidance on what restrictions are reasonable, battles over state and local laws will simply be kicked down to the lower courts. Gun-control advocates better step up the fight, said The New York Times in an editorial. Handguns already kill more than 30,000 Americans every year. Unless local officials use the latitude in the ruling to press for more and better gun restrictions, “the results will be all too real and bloody.”

You’ve got it backward, said Damon Root in the New York Daily News, and a little review of history shows why. Gun control was originally conceived by white racists trying to keep firearms out of the hands of recently freed slaves. It was therefore appropriate that the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Otis McDonald, was a 76-year-old African-American veteran who wanted to protect himself from illegally armed thugs who were terrorizing his neighborhood. Gun-control laws didn’t affect the thugs one bit; they only prevented citizens like McDonald from defending themselves. That’s now changed, because the court has finally given the Second Amendment “some long-overdue respect.”

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