There is a lot of noise recently about guns. It would be inaccurate to call that noise a debate for many reasons. An important reason is that the language used in the noise, and the language we have available to use, is degraded to the point that it is hard to determine what is being said. It is sad to note that, very often, speakers want to confuse rather than elucidate their listeners. I hope to clarify some of the issues at stake; it is not my intent to argue for an answer, and my reason for avoiding a personal opinion should become clear eventually.
The echoes of gunfire in Newtown, Connecticut, had not stopped reverberating, and as we can all remember; the stories being reported were still wildly inaccurate, when politicians jumped on the opportunity to grab the spotlight and further their agendas. Since they acted before anyone knew what had happened, there is little reason to suspect that they were responding to the events. Some may have thought they were, taking the well-known tack: “I know it will not help, but we must do something.” Certainly, in such a case, there is no great probability that what we do will help others, so it must be done to help ourselves. Emotion is a better tool for a demagogue than reason.
The Second Amendment is invoked to in such expostulations. But an important aspect of this lack of communication is the failure to ask, let alone answer, the question: “What does the Second Amendment mean? What right does it protect?”
That is called “begging the question”. This phrase has become popular recently with people who want to appear more erudite than they really are, and throw it around, usually in situations where it seems they mean “raise the question”, but that is precisely what it does not mean. This is more than mere whining by a grammarian. Symbolic language is what set us apart from other animals, and it is the tool we use to survive and improve our common lot in life. A dull tool is less useful than one that is well maintained, and a perverse disdain for proper language and the learning of good language and the improvement of our language will disarm us in our daily struggles to help ourselves and each other. This theme will reappear in this blog.
To beg the question means to avoid discussing the question at issue, and proceed to argue as though the point were settled in your favor. If you have not been taught this technique, you will more easily fall for the gambit.
First, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or “legitimate sporting purposes”. Go read it. Read the whole Constitution. Read the copious documents that were written to support and oppose it. Nothing there. Nevertheless, Americans have a right to hunt, and a right to use firearms for sport; it is just not in the Second Amendment. For that reason saying that you do not intend to infringe the right to hunt, in no way indicates that you do not intend to infringe the right to bear arms a set forth in the Second Amendment; as things stand, it rather raises the suspicion that you do.
Some people have recently begun to voice the obvious fact that the Second Amendment refers to guns that could be used to oppose a usurpative government. That is perfectly true, and remember that the people who wrote it were not thinking, any more, about King George, but rather about the very government they had just established according to the best principles they could hammer out together. It is true, but not the whole story, and for people today, some of whom cannot conceive a world outside their own comfortable existence, not the best argument. It should be noted on this score, that since the Second Amendment clearly refers to a militia, the assault rifle is probably just exactly what the delegates meant. Not that that means that we have to allow people to own fully automatic weapons, but rather that we have to argue and agree democratically why they should not. We cannot just pretend that such a thing is ridiculous.
The larger meaning of the Second Amendment may be found in its environment, both in the words around it and the culture from which it grew. It may come as a surprise to many people that the Constitution was not the result of a manufactured crisis, hatched in secret, and adopted with no time to read it, let alone debate it. Every word was discussed, every phrase scrutinized, by people who had been developing their ideas of self-government in their various colonial governments for scores of years. The Bill of Rights came about because enough people thought the Constitution lacked explicit protection of certain rights that they deemed essential to the survival of a free people to persuade the majority to correct the oversight. Hunting and sport do not rise to that level; there is something very basic at stake here and it is important to think seriously about it before throwing it away in a fit of manufactured emotion.
Next: what are we overlooking by failing to understand the Bill of Rights as a whole, as more than the sum of its parts?