“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.” Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
If you had to name one of the most troublesome points of law in America, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything more challenging than the second amendment. If you could go back and speak with the founding fathers to determine exactly what their intentions were for this amendment, you would. You would go back and advise them that it needed to be worded differently to avoid hundreds of years of problems. I think people on both sides of the gun argument would agree with me on this.
One interpretation is that it only means that the State has the right to go to war or the right to have a militia. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘to bear arms’ as “to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight” and this definition goes back to 1795. Then, of course, there is the more traditional interpretation that keeping and bearing arms means simply owning them.
The Supreme Court, though, wasn’t looking at the interpretation of the second amendment in its most recent decision McDonald v Chicago. Rather, it was deciding whether or not the second amendment should be incorporated into the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. The due process clause says
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The petitioners argued that “privileges and immunities” includes the second amendment and the “no abridge…without due process” applies to states as well as the federal government. The Court has agreed with this argument which means that laws enacted by states or cities banning handguns are unconstitutional.
In the opinion of the Court Justice Alito states that one of the reasons the petitioners feel the need to have a handgun in their home is for self-defence. I could go into all sorts of arguments here for or against guns but I don’t want to do that. I am not a lawyer but I read the second amendment as saying that citizens should be allowed to own a gun. What does trouble me is the fact that people feel the need to own a gun for self-defence. This is a sad state of affairs for Chicago:
“The plight of Chicagoans living in high-crime areas was recently highlighted when two Illinois legislators representing Chicago districts called on the Governor to deploy the Illinois National Guard to patrol the City’s streets. The legislators noted that the number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year [equalled] the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq…”
When the second amendment was written, America was a very different place with vast amounts of open land on which animals and killers/thieves could roam freely. Owning a gun to protect your home and family was essential. Today, however, we ought not have to rely on self-defence.
Fair enough if you want to own a gun for recreational use such as visiting a shooting range or hunting. What saddens me, though, is the number of people who can either not rely on or have lost faith in their local law enforcement, such as the petitioners in this case. I don’t want to argue against owning guns but I argue against the need to own a gun. We should be able to rely on law enforcement to protect us and our homes. If this is not the case in Chicago and other parts of America, perhaps that needs to be looked at with as much fervour and questioning as that of owning a handgun.
Source:
Wikipedia