Crime is everywhere in this world and everyone is capable of committing it. The police are here to protect us, but they cannot always be there on a moment’s notice. Can you feel safe and secure in your own home without the means to protect yourself? Enter gun control, one of the most pressing issues of our time. Proponents say they want common sense limits on the possession, purchase, and transportation of firearms. Opponents say that such restrictions violate the Constitution’s second amendment and would do little if anything to stop gun violence.
Guns are understandably associated with violence. Citizens fear guns and are taught from a very young age to avoid them and treat them with caution. In 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 31,672 gun-related fatalities, including 19,392 by suicide, 11,078 homicides, and 606 deaths by accidental shooting. The headlines are replete with tragic acts of violence committed using guns, many involving mass shootings.
On July 20, 2012, at the Century movie theater in Aurora Colorado, a gunman dressed in tactical clothing set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms, including a 9-mm carbine rifle, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. More recently, on December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty young students and six school faculty members. His weapon of choice was his mother’s Bushmaster XM15-E2S, a semi-automatic military style rifle.
Proponents of gun control maintain that imposing more stringent background checks and limiting certain types of guns would reduce gun violence, particularly acts involving multiple fatalities.
“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” said President Barack Obama as he addressed the nation following the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut.
Guns, however, are not the only weapons used to commit violent crimes, including mass murders. It seems that where there is a will, there is a way. On May 5, 2013, a soccer referee died after an attack from a recreational league female soccer player. She attacked him with only her fists and the referee died of a critical punch to the head. In Texas, a teenage girl was abducted by a former “obsessed” ex-boyfriend at knifepoint. Guns are no prerequisite for mass murders either. The weapon of choice at the Boston Marathon this year, where three died and another 260 were injured, was a pressure cooker filled with metal objects. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated an explosive-filled Ryder rental truck filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680. Most infamous of all, on September 11, 2001, an Islamic terrorist group flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center, collapsing both towers and killing 2,996 people.
Whether or not gun control measures would be effective at reducing crime is a heatedly contested issue, and the focus of legislation recently defeated in the U.S. Senate. The larger question, however, may be whether such measures are even constitutional.
“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 statement is the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Many proponents of gun control maintain that the second amendment applies only to those who are part of a well-regulated militia, and not to individual citizens. They point to the 1939 Supreme Court case United States v. Miller, which involved a criminal prosecution under the National Firearms Act of 1934. Passed in response to public outcry over the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the NFA required certain types of firearms (including but not limited to fully automatic firearms and short-barreled rifles and shotguns) to be registered with the Miscellaneous Tax Unit, which would later become part of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In its decision, the court found that there was no conflict between the NFA and the Second Amendment, writing that:
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."
Gun control proponents cite the decision as proof that the second amendment applies only to militias, and not to individuals. However, second amendment advocates have always contended that the court did not truly resolve the issue, as it did not specify what it meant by a militia. What most would regard as a well-regulated state militia today, for example, might not be what the Constitution’s framers intended when they drafted the second amendment more than 250 years ago. In the 1700s, all able bodied men were considered part of the state militia and expected to keep a firearm in the event that they were called upon to defend the state. Today, the states no longer have standing militias. However, the Constitution and its original intent still apply. Second amendment proponents argue that since all citizens were part of the state militia at the time the second amendment was drafted, and all citizens were expected to have guns, that the term militia in effect applies to individual citizens.
More recently, in the 2007 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clarified its position on the second amendment, coming down on the side of individual gun rights.
The case arose after the District of Columbia passed a law (the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975) restricting handgun ownership, excluding those registered prior to 1975. The law also required that all firearms including rifles and shotguns be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. In its decision, the court struck down certain provisions of the law unconstitutional, finding that handguns are "arms" for the purposes of the Second Amendment and that the District of Columbia's actions amounted to an unconstitutional banning. More specifically, the court held that:
1.
The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
2.
The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the federal government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.
While seeming to settle the matter of whether the second amendment applies to individuals (it does), the Heller decision left plenty of wiggle room for gun control proponents, finding that, “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” So the debate rages on, what are limits of the second amendment, and under what circumstances and to what extent can gun ownership and use be infringed?