Today, we digress, but only somewhat. The focus of ZONELAW is to examine the elements of great place making. Drive-by shootings, open carry of long rifles in residential neighborhoods, automatic weapon firing on New Year’s Eve is behavior that is not compatible with great places. The destruction is daily, given the trepidation in human interactions because of the fear of lethal retaliation. At every public meeting of every small town you are greeted by a massively armed guard, wrapped in Kevlar reminding you what might happen when people freely express themselves. The issue of mass murdering is not only today’s headlines, but the unraveling of any neighborhood. No great places can exist in such an environment. Hence, this article.
Twenty-seven words brought us to this precipice: “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.” Yes, that is the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. So much has been written about it that you can spend a lifetime sifting through the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup to divine its meaning. When originally crafted, a good firearm got off 4 to 6 bullets every minute and had an effective range of 50 yards. A bump-stock AR 15 fires almost 900 bullets a minute and can have an effective range of 900 yards. So today we give one man one weapon that makes him the equivalent of a 150 men. I guess that is a militia.
The confirmation that every person can be his own army was only recently decided in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). Up until that point there had been a healthy debate over whether the 27 words meant that the citizenry had a collective right to be armed (e.g. your national guard) or an individual had a right to a weapon. It was a 5-4 decision, the smallest of margins, and pronounced by Judge Antonin Scalia. And now, for a reason associated with the diagramming of sentences, hellish firepower is lawfully unleashed on children. You see the first 13 words, set off with commas from the last 14 words, were of no consequence. They are a prefatory clause.
But the opinion is not an unbridled statement to make no law abridging the right to carry a firearm, a phrase the framers of the Constitution could have written since they knew how to use it for free speech, the immediately preceding first amendment. The Heller opinion contains this statement: “Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” So Scalia knew what was coming. A conservative justice told us what to do and we skipped that part of the opinion? So ‘God given right” conservatives, please place Scalia in hell alongside Brady and others.
Personally, I do not believe anyone wrote a right for each man to be his own army. But, the children taking up this cause need not amend the Constitution. It is the law written by a United States Supreme Court Justice. Take the first step and stop the nonsense. Let no legislator stand behind a shield of protecting a sacred right; that shield will not stop a bullet unleashed from an AR 15.