A few days ago, a father of one of the children killed in the Parkland school shooting voiced his emotion and rage at President Trump, but then said that he didn’t favor gun restrictions; instead he wanted the school to be made a safe place. He said the battle over gun restrictions was for another time.
Many on the Right are talking about how to make the schools safe by having a police presence in the schools, arming teachers, security checks upon entering, and other measures. The idea is to turn schools into a safe place by turning them into secure zones.
This is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First, the idea is dysfunctional. It would have a devastating impact on the character of schools. Second, it would not change the overall problem created by the prevalence of guns. School shootings may be the ones with the greatest public interest and visibility, but individual shootings far outnumber those. Turning schools into a secure zone would protect children from this threat while in school, but it will not protect them or anyone outside that zone.
It is dysfunctional because it’s another step in turning America into an armed camp. Do you really want to see police parading around in every town in the country looking for potential terrorists? I’ve seen that in some other countries in the past, and it is not a comforting feeling. Do you want your children to grow up, learn, and play in an atmosphere more similar to a prison than to a school?
No, the only answer to reducing gun violence, both in the schools and in the general public, is to strengthen restrictions on who can own guns, strengthen background checks, and prohibit the sale of automatic rifles like the AK-15 or bump stocks to the general public.
It is important to state that both I and most if not all gun control advocates believe that hunting is a legitimate sport and that people must be allowed to own appropriate firearms to participate in that sport. Contrary to the conspiracy fears fostered by the NRA, nothing proposed in the gun control debate goes against the interests of hunters or sportsmen. The rifles they use would not be impacted by such laws and their ownership would not be impacted. And gun control advocates have no interest in taking those firearms away from them in the future.
For the NRA to invoke the 2nd Amendment in the fight against any and all gun control is absurd. Forgetting about whether the 2nd Amendment really means that each person has the constitutional right to bear arms as opposed to saying that local governments can maintain militias, at the time the amendment was written, the firearms in question were muskets and flint-lock pistols.
If the founders had envisioned an AK-15 or bump stocks, do you in your wildest imagination think that they would give each person a right to own such an instrument of destruction? No.
Also, regarding the recent interpretation of the 2nd amendment granting a constitutional right for individuals to bear arms, this is a base misreading of the amendment. The question has always been, what is the sense of the clause “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In the past, it was held to be subordinate to the natural reading of the wording which was to protect the existence of a “well-regulated militia.”
When the constitution was written, localities and states did not have standing armed forces. When the need existed, they sent a call out to the populace for soldiers and they brought their own firearms. Thus they had to have the right to own firearms in order for the militia call-up to be effective.
We don’t live in that world anymore. And so there is no need for a constitutional right to bear arms. Instead, it should just be a right subject to the control of the law.
But even if one argues that there is a constitutional right, constitutional rights are not absolute, they are always subject to reasonable restrictions to protect the greater good. And restrictions on gun ownership, background checks, and the type of guns available to the general public are certainly “reasonable restrictions to protect the greater good.” The vast majority of Americans think so, even Republicans. The only real force on the other side is the NRA, and those who have fallen under the sway of its fake fears.
