America’s Indefatigable Passion with Guns
By Mohajer Ansari
Pasadena, CA
The Second Amendment to the US constitution was ratified on December 15 – just ten days before Christmas - in 1791. It is a simple declaration and contains only twenty-seven words.
In the past 229+ years, those words - which some would justifiably argue make no sense in contemporary times - have become the basis of rights to bear arms and have slowly legalized the unjustifiable ownership of lethal weapons of all imaginations. Since its ratification, this amendment has been shaping the obsession of the society with guns and their unimaginable consequences. Originally, the phrase “well regulated militia” was meant to represent the group that armed itself against the British army and eventually became the military wing of the resistance. Over the time, it has, however, evolved as one of the most divisive issues splintering the nation along the fault lines of prejudicial disposition due to race, ethnicity and wealth. With every incident of deadly mass shooting in a mall or cinema, on a school campus, on a college class room or a dorm, the debate only keeps intensifying to the next decibel from either side of the argument, without an amicable consensus on how to curb this insatiable lust for arms. In the meantime, the grief and pain inflicted by gun violence is only intensifying. In this game, the victims - dead or alive - do not matter.
To many the phrase “well regulated militia” does not make any sense (semantic or otherwise) today, as there are no occupying forces on the American soil for more than two-and-a-quarter centuries. In contemporary times, some even argue that extreme factions have literally hijacked the concept. This only adds fuel to the debate about what constitutes a militia in modern America. The line of distinction of "the people" who have the right to bear arms has clearly blurred. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its gun enthusiast supporters – both in high places of government and general public – have conveniently modified the text of the original Second Amendment, making it relevant to their cause. In a sign placed prominently in the lobby of NRA National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia, the slogan reads: "… the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" . With the first 13 words from the original brazenly abrogated , this sign has come to be the most sanctimonious and sacrosanct parchment of NRA’s gun creed. It is this misquoted half-cocked truth that has made NRA a powerful five-million-member strong pro-gun lobby that fiercely resists any and all efforts directed towards gun control – no matter how heinous the crimes that involve guns are.
Ironically, NRA was born out of shame! The Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War were embarrassed by their dismal acumen for marksmanship compared with the Confederates’. As a way to promote, encourage and improve their rifle shooting skills on a scientific basis, they formed NRA in 1871. General Ambrose Burnside with impressive facial hair (that later led to the invention of the term ‘sideburns’) was its very first president-elect, with William C. Church, a former New York Times reporter as the cofounder.
Since the time of its coming to be - exactly a sesquicentennial ago - NRA has worked diligently to wield the kind of power it does today, continually garnering the dedicated philanthropy and political benevolence of rich white folks in high places across all walks of life. Up until into late 1970s it had kept itself in the image of a benign organization catering only to the American passion for hunting and shooting festivities. But as the crime rates rose and the conservative movement began to take a foothold in the Southern and Central states in the 60s and 70s, NRA’s vision also shifted. It soon began to foresee the might of lobbying in the corridors of politics. That was the time that saw the right to bear arms becoming as sacred as the voting right or the right to marry - in the name of self-protection among a large faction of its membership. NRA’s upper echelons failed to gauge the shifting tide and continued to portray the organization as a benign hunting and recreational shooting club.
That feigned oblivion came at a hefty price.
It was during NRA’s annual meeting in Ohio in 1977 when the conservative element of its membership staged a surprise coup that came to be known as The Cincinnati Revolt. It was led by Harlon Carter - a hotshot head of NRA’s lobbying arm. Legend has it that once he shot a Mexican teenager dead and was jailed. It was under him that the meeting became extremely fraught and the traditional NRA leadership was routed out. That historic moment radicalized the organization, establishing fierce opposition to gun control as its main motto. Over my dead body, became NRA’s defining phrase.
The political battle to pass stricter gun control legislation always made a good evening news headline without making any dent in the resolve of the opposition. A major blow to that paradigm was delivered by the US Supreme Court on June 26 of 2008, thanks to the stand a security guard named Dick Karvin Heller took in Washington. The District of Columbia had some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. It barred individuals from keeping a gun at home. But Heller lived in a high-crime area and wanted to take his work gun home as a mean of self-protection, arguing that DC's handgun ban and the requirement that lawfully-owned rifles and shotguns be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock, violated the guarantee provided by the second amendment. The security guard sued the district for prohibiting him from keeping his handgun at home and a group of libertarian lawyers took up his case.
In the historic District of Columbia v. Hellercase (554 U.S 570), the Supreme Court sided with Heller and struck down the provisions of the Firearms Control Regulation Act of 1975 as unconstitutional. It was not a unanimous decision: five justices thought the DC law ought to be struck down, while four dissented. Even today, some jurists view this as a fine example of originality in the practice and application of jurisprudence. Thus, an entirely new interpretation of those 27 words in the Second Amendment as applicable to the 21 stcentury was drawn, allowing an individual to own a gun, even if he or she is not technically in a militia.
Justice Antonin Scalia - an avid hunter himself - wrote the majority opinion, stating that on the basis of both text and history, there seems no doubt that the Second Amendment conferred an individual the right to keep and bear arms.
NRA and its gun lobby were ecstatic. The NRA chief Wayne LaPierre called the ruling a great moment in American history.
"Our founding fathers wrote and intended the Second Amendment to be an individual right. The Supreme Court has now acknowledged it," he said.
This ruling, however, was not a free pass. Justice Scalia also cautioned that like most other rights, the Second Amendment right was not unlimited. It was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever, in any manner whatsoever and, for a purpose whatever. He also elaborated that the court’s opinion did not mean that the longstanding prohibitions, such as, ‘the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings’ were now lifted.
The sale and ownership of guns– of all kinds – skyrocketed in the decade since that historic decision. Hardly anybody seems to have heeded the cautionary clause in that historic writ. The evidence of that heedlessness is manifested in the brazenly indiscriminate accumulation of weapons of war and their use at the least expected places. The Americans lament and momentarily struggle with gory images of mutilated bodies, dying children and innocent bystanders as a result of violence in Africa, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan every day, but are hardly moved when the same level of violence is unleashed in their own backyard by a friend, a colleague or a family member. The mass shootings at Columbine High School (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), Aurora, Colorado (2012), Sandy Hook Elementary School (2012), San Bernardino (2015), Orlando nightclub (2016), Las Vegas music festival (2017), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (2018) are stark reminders of the increasing callousness and acute numbness that has crept into American political psyche towards the innocence or the value of human lives.
Reacting to the power of March For Our Lives events on March 24, 2018 across the nation, Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens felt compelled to surmise that the Court’s decision in the DC vs. Heller case was wrong and debatable. It simply provided the National Rifle Association with ‘a propaganda weapon of immense power’, he said. As usual, nobody cared for this jurist’s opining on the issue.
NRA’s reaction to the mass shooting of March 22, 2021 by a Syrian immigrant that left 10 people dead in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, was to brazenly quote the Second Amendment on its official Twitter feed!
How desensitized have we become to such horrific acts of violence?
