The Gun Control Debate: Does the Second Amendment Mean We Must Allow Insane Convicts to Own Assault Weapons?

Last weekend (July 2009) I watched the CBS TV program 60 Minutes and saw the story that they had originally run last April, with updates, about the current state of gun control laws. It focused on the so-called "loophole" in existing gun legislation that allows people who aren't gun dealers to sell firearms at gun shows without conducting background checks. This means that convicted felons and mentally unstable individuals can buy all sorts of guns - including automatic weapons such as the infamous "assault rifles." Weapons like those that a mentally unstable student at Virginia Tech used to kill 32 people on April 16, 2007. Surprisingly, proposed legislation to close this loophole in the state of Virginia recently was defeated. If sensible gun control laws like those that simply require background checks before completing a sale cannot be passed even in the wake of such a disaster, I have to ask: What is going on here?

In the CBS story, correspondent Lesley Stahl visits a gun show in Virginia and chats with Philip Van Cleave, the president of Virginia's largest gun-rights group. They spoke of the loophole. "Why not make it uniform and have everybody go through the background check?" Stahl asked. Van Cleave replied with the same hard-line attitude typical of all NRA members and the powerful gun rights lobby: "Well, how about making it uniform and have nobody go through the background check?" he replied. The Second Amendment doesn't say, 'You can get a gun if you go through a background check.'" I wish Stahl had asked him the question that I like to ask such people-do you really want it to be easy for nut-cases and convicted felons to be able to get guns just so you can cling to your all-or-nothing attitude about the second amendment? I suspect that Van Cleave would have said yes, it's OK with him if they can get guns easily, because guns don't kill people, criminals do, or some other trite cliché. He would argue like so many do that it is better to arm everybody so that the criminals won't be the only ones with the guns.

Such opponents of gun control often cite claims that in places where gun control legislation is enacted, armed robberies or murders go up not down. But such claims have no basis in fact, and when they actually quote statistics to back them, the statistics are misused or flat out wrong. In one of the comments on the CBS web site that claim is repeated: "statistics prove that every where there has been a ban on guns of any kind, crime goes through the roof." It prompted me to search for any such statistics. I found an article reporting on a detailed analysis of the effect of gun control legislation on crime rates published in the Cato Journal, mouthpiece of the Libertarian Cato Institute. Despite their obvious bias against gun control, the best they could come up with was a lack of evidence to show that crime rates went down due to gun control, but even they could not show that rates actually went up. Another article I found debunks the commonly forwarded email about the Australian experience after their 1995 gun buyback program: "According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of armed robberies involving firearms has actually declined over the last several years."

So what does the Second Amendment to the Constitution really say and why is it interpreted in such different ways by different people? Well, the complete text of the amendment is:

"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."

This wording in its entirety sounds awkward or weird, but the more often quoted final phrase seems clearer: "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." The pro-gun people often conveniently leave out that odd phrase in front rather than attempting to interpret how it might modify the overall intent. There has been and continues to be much debate over what it really means or what the authors intended, and whether it should even apply today in situations unanticipated by them.

A good summary of the debate is found in this paragraph from spectacle.org :

"The Second Amendment is surrounded by an unusual amount of fog for a plainly written clause of a constitution. While some of this is attributable to an apparent contradiction in its language--a tension between "Militia" and "people"-- much more of the confusion is attributable to hype created by both sides in the gun dispute. The gun control people don't want the word "people" to mean anything and the gun rights people don't want the word "militia" to mean anything."

Other good discussions on this topic are found in my reference links below.

So, what do you think - should we really allow guns to be sold to murderous nut-cases without any registration or restrictions at all? Or is that hard-line position too extreme? Is any middle ground possible on this issue?

References:

http:// www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters.html
https://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n1/cj26n1.html
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1114/what-does-the-right-to-bear-arms-really-mean
http:// www.spectacle.org/996/2d.html