After the Parkland shooting (2/14/2018). May the memory of the dead be a blessing, and may the living find consolation.
We are told that the right to bear arms is a right of self defense. How do we balance that right with the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?
Cass Sunstein observes (2/15/2018) that the late Antonin Scalia determined that
the Second Amendment is restricted to weapons “in common use at the time.” He added that the Constitution leaves government with many tools for combating the problem of handgun violence, including regulation.
This reader wonders what ‘common use’ means, and wonders whether AR-15 rifles meet that criterion. (In his darker moments, he wonders: what stops someone from arguing that bazookas are protected by the Second Amendment?)
Among some supporters of gun rights, calls for gun control after Parkland represent an attack on freedom. As reported in the New York Times (2/22/2018), Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association,
warned darkly that “our country will be changed forever” at the hands of socialist conspirators.
“History proves it. Every time in every nation in which this political disease rises to power, its citizens are repressed, their freedoms are destroyed and their firearms are banned and confiscated,” he said, reading slowly and deliberately from his prepared text.
Our president appears to feel that the problem is not guns but mentally troubled people, according to the New York Times (2/15/2018):
“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior,” Mr. Trump said in a tweet hours before he addressed the public. “Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
He delivered similar remarks in November, after a gunman with a military-style rifle mowed down more than two dozen parishioners in a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex. Mr. Trump told reporters that the problem “isn’t a guns situation” and that the shooting signified “a mental health problem at the highest level.”
In October, after a gunman in Las Vegas killed 58 people and wounded hundreds in the deadliest mass shooting in United States history, Mr. Trump called the assailant “a very sick man” and a “demented person.”
Is the problem of mass shootings a sign that the mental health system is not functioning as it ought? Dr. Amy Barnhorst, Vice Chairwoman of Community Psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, in a piece entitled “The Mental Health System Can’t Stop Mass Shooters” (2/20/2018), observes:
The reason the mental health system fails to prevent mass shootings is that mental illness is rarely the cause of such violence. Even if all potential mass shooters did get psychiatric care, there is no reliable cure for angry young men who harbor violent fantasies. And the laws intended to stop the mentally ill from buying guns are too narrow and easily sidestepped; people like Nikolas Cruz and my patient are unlikely to qualify.
Some might argue: Let’s lock hateful young men away, so that they won’t kill people. What irony! In order to avoid reasonable regulation, consistent with the Second Amendment, would we rush to deprive people of their liberties for hateful thoughts?
I’d rather lock up AR-15s than people.