There's a simple fix to America's gun problem: Honor the entire Second Amendment

Walking past the magazine section at our local grocery store, I glanced over to see a Guns &Ammo special edition featuring the AR-15. I found the sight of the magazine jarring just three days after a high-powered rifle was used to kill nearly a dozen people and wound dozens more in the Highland Park shooting fifty miles from our home in the Chicago suburbs.

News about the effects of this type of weapon is disturbing. People are maimed beyond recognition and even torn apart by rounds designed to do just that; completely rip the human body to shreds.

On the trip home from the grocery store, I listened to a radio program where a caller defending so-called "gun rights" described such weapons as mere "tools" that are harmless on their own. He went on to blame mass shootings on parents not raising their kids right and lack of God in the schools.

None of those arguments addresses the real problem with guns in the United States of America. The source of all gun violence in this country is clear. Our Supreme Court has long chosen to ignore the first half of the Second Amendment, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state," to emphasize the latter half, "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed."

The irony of this emphasis by conservative justices, especially the late Antonin Scalia, is that these constitutional "originalists" and "textualists" elect to cherry-pick the second half of the Second Amendment's phraseology to satisfy the selfish notion that gun rights should never be limited. By anything.

But the use of weapons like the AR-15 to mow down citizens and the fact that there are now more guns than people in America proves that the conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment is both hypocritical and highly flawed. Tossing out a historically relevant clause about gun regulation in the Second Amendment to creates a vigilante culture where guns dictate who is free to move about, and who is not. That is hardly a judicious or legally conscientious decision. To put it bluntly: conservatives have been lying to us about the Second Amendment for decades.

That brand of corrupt legal interpretation is also what the Republican Party has preached (literally) and protected for years. The vigilante notion that people should even have the right to Open Carry weapons around in public is also what the National Rifle Association has pushed for since the early 1980s.

The result is that the United States of America is now the bloodiest, most gun-ridden country in the world. Innocent people are dying every day. Even our police fear for their lives in every circumstance. They know they are outgunned and vulnerable to gun violence every time they step out of the station. They fear guns in domestic violence situations, or when they make a seemingly innocent traffic stop. And for certain they fear for their lives when responding to school shootings. We saw that fear and equivocation at work in the Uvalde school tragedy. The police were paralyzed in judgment and action by the fact that they might all be shot dead if they entered the school. The shooter inside constituted a one-man militia. So much for a well-regulated body or the security of a free state.

Gun gridlock

The recent string of mass shootings is shocking, and yet the nation as a whole feels powerless to do anything about them because government legislation that could solve the problem is largely tied down by the ideological anchor of a highly flawed Second Amendment interpretation. Finally, after Uvalde, our Congress took some itty-bitty action about gun laws. But these moves are a pea-shooter up against the machine gun of weapons proliferation in America.

The idea that guns should be easy to get and own may be ideologically appetizing and satisfying to gun proponents, but it is an intellectually dishonest tactic to turn the Constitution into a tool for selling and owning guns without restrictions. The amount of money donated to complicit politicians by groups like the NRA is beyond corrupt. The organization even has the gall to 'rate' politicians on their gun rights voting records.

Let's explore a helpful analogy. Allowing the phrase"the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" to serve as the sole and absolute meaning of the Second Amendment is like saying that an NBA star that just took four steps without dribbling the ball should not be called for traveling because the referee thinks the last two steps represent real freedom to play the game. And that's kind of true these days. The NBA is now one of the loosey-goosiest leagues in the world when it comes to the rules of basketball. But imagine if someone got genuinely hurt every time a ballplayer played fast with the rules. That's the situation we're in with the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The game we're playing with guns is not well-regulated, and people are dying. And to conclude this analogy, where guns are banned in some states, they still "travel" across borders to inflict harm in others.

The ongoing and oft-classic justifications for loosey-goosey gun laws is specious reasoning at best. I've listened to a number of YouTube interviews with the late Justice Antonin Scalia and was shocked to hear him state in one interview that he was neither concerned or convinced that gun proliferation might affect the nation. His offering was something on the order of: "We'll just have to wait and see."

Well, how long are we going to wait? The rest of the conservative justices are equally specious in their reasoning. Now they hold a 6-3 majority on the court and recently gave yet another free pass to gun rights across the nation . This is a disgusting situation. We'll repeat: People keep dying because conservatives are too selfish to care. The Pro-Life claims of the so-called conservative movement in America are outright lies. We know this because the leading cause of death among school-aged children is now gun violence.*

In a CNN article covering the 2008 ruling that freed gun owners from further regulation, Scalia used his textualist skills to dispense with the part of the law he cared nothing about by conscribing it to a product of the past. This proves the disingenuous nature of his entire originalist philosophy. "(T)he conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty," he wrote, observing at another point that the phrase "bear arms" was "unambiguously used to refer to the carrying of weapons outside of an organized militia."

He went on to carelessly dismiss the potential impact of the court's decision. "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," he added.

Scalia's affable public nature belied a patent cynicism toward anyone he considered beneath his ideology. Most of all, he and his conservative cronies thrived on ignoring the consequences of their decisions and legislation. The Court's decision in 2008 unleashed guns into the hands not just of the mentally ill, but to ideologically determined racists and white supremacists using high-powered weapons capable of tearing people in half. These same guns are used to kill people in schools, mow down worshippers in churches and shoot people at will from the rooftops of America. The blood of these Americans is on the hands of the Supreme Court justices who incautiously, dishonestly self-righteously credit the latter half of the Second Amendment as Holy Gospel. It is their God.

We'll reiterate a point to be specific: Scalia and his ideological partners asserted that gun rights stand alone from any form of regulation. “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,” Scalia said.

This exemplifies the originalist Big Lie about gun rights. But it satisfies the lustful cravings of a conservative constituency that refuses to accept any limits on its behavior, much less tolerate any diminishment of its power over society. The true intention of the Founding Fathers in aiming to maintain the security of a free state is cast aside by conservatives like a race car driver tossing out a buggy whip out the window.

But that should not be the case. Anyone interested in the civil rights of all people––not just the gun owners in the America–– should recognize that the need for a "well-regulated militia" still exists. In fact, it is more needed than ever before. Granted, the notion of a functional militia has changed in nature. The American militia as defined by all those that own guns has grown in substance. That militia has grown in deadliness too, with weapons the Founding Fathers would have found unimaginably destructive. Refusing to recognize these facts or the dangers they constitute is a sin of power.

Sins of power

Not only does a real militia exist across the face of America due to the massive proliferation of arms, there are also highly dangerous counter-culture militias claiming that the right to bear arms was originally conceived to arm citizens in a war against their own government. That's a dangerously romantic ideal. We've seen Proud Boys and Oath Keepers marching around with guns. There are grandiose militias playing army in the woods of Idaho and other states. There are fascist militias spouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans while hoisting guns and brandishing hate. Why are these gun owners not well-regulated?

These people have convinced themselves that if push comes to shove, they would take on the American military or worse, unleash a civil war within the United States. We're too close to that atmosphere in the wake of the insurrection on January 6. It doesn't help that the same conservatives and Republicans (an oxymoron these days...) that support gun unrestricted rights also deny the verity of the January 6 sedition based on the Big Lie that the election was stolen. The effort by Trump to steal back the office of President and the continuing denial of the 2020 election results is the real tyranny in this country right now, but gaslighting politicians and deranged conspiracy theorists have millions convinced otherwise. Whose side are the guns on now? That is a devastatingly dire question.

Clearly the people tyranny on their minds trusted a lying President that called upon them multiple times to fight on his behalf. Then he invited them to Washington and called for magnetometers to be removed so that people bearing weapons of many kinds could waltz onto the Capitol grounds "bearing arms" with insurrection on their minds. These unregulated militias permanently debunk any notion that the right to bear arms is disconnected from the Second Amendment demand for a "well-regulated militia."

The cure

So what's the cure for this madness? The concept of a well-regulated militia must be reconnected to gun rights as the constitution originally dictated. I know, that sounds ironic coming from the liberal side of the equation. But that's exactly the point. The Constitution originally was conceived from liberalism. Its most conservative elements, such as support for slavery, preventing women from voting, and even Prohibition, have all been amended or eliminated over the last two hundred years. And rightly so. These 'traditions' in America didn't grant full personhood to the people they affected.

Neither does the Second Amendment. When gun rights are not well-regulated, anyone not that is not carrying a weapon is less than a person when others tote around deadly weapons in a country where vigilante laws such as Stand Your Ground grant people the right to shoot at will if they feel threatened. This is barbarism that makes American citizenship a form of slavery to guns and the madness they engender.

Glancing at that AR-15 magazine (pun intended) on the grocery store shelf reminded me of the days when porno mags dominated newsstands across the country. Gun porn is no different than sexual pornography. It is addicting and feeds a sense of power that is abnormal and exaggerated in society.

And if we think about sexual violence and gun violence in a related context, there is hardly a difference between rape and shooting someone with a gun. Both are crimes against another human being. A warped sense of domination and dominion drives (mostly) men to rape. A warped sense of domination and dominion also drives mass shootings and handgun violence in a thousand different circumstances.

The Center for Disease Control is permitted to collect data and do studies on rape and sexual violence. But no such research is permitted on gun violence. That's because the conservative lobby defending the warped interpretation of the Second Amendment does not want to truth to be known. It reveals too much about the lies we've been sold by conservative justices that the "right to bear arms" is somehow connected to personal freedom. It is not. Millions of people function daily without carrying firearms of any kind. Millions more don't own a gun in the home.

Blue Lives Matter: the real story

So let's also be specific: Blue Lives do matter. The people trained and paid to provide community policing across our country need to be protected from gun proliferation. It is the vigilante interpretation of the Second Amendment that places our police in danger every day. They can't protect us anymore, and the sad claim that a good guy with a gun is always going to be there is one of the biggest lies on earth. Even the gun rights advocates eventually have to admit this. Yet their solution to the problem of gun violence continues to be adding even more guns to the equation.

We no longer have the "security of a free state" in the United States of America if this is what's required for citizens to be safe on our streets and in our schools, churches and other public places. Instead, we have a vigilante justice system in which some shooters, especially white male shooters, are given preference over people of color in policing situations. Nothing else explains why the Highland Park shooter was taken peacefully into custody while a young black man was shot sixty times during a routine traffic stop, then handcuffed after he was dead. The melanin factor of institutional racism is rife among our nation's police. Racial profiling is real. It's time to deal with that issue profoundly and aggressively if necessary.

A well-regulated militia is a return to sanity

It all begins with restoring the first half of the Second Amendment to its rightful place as a controlling force in the administration of gun rights in America. We need to dispense with the Big Lie of Scalia and Thomas the rest of the selfishly motivated and often fearful gun addicts in this country. Are we going to let the nation's cowardly, fearful and selfish citizens have their run over the rest of us? Or are we going to stand our ground for genuine freedom and clamp down on gun ownership as a well-regulated militia demands?

If gun advocates do not respect the full constitutional call for a well-regulated milita in this country, then they lose all credibility. The conservative justices on the current court have shown their willingness to lie in their confirmation hearings in order to impose their judicial bias on issues such as abortion. Both our gun laws and the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade represent the miscarriage of justice for ideologically conflicted beliefs held by those making the rulings. They've lied to us for too long, and that includes the hyper-religious conservatives crying about abortion while blessing gun violence with all their bleeding hearts.

The situation on both these issues is atrocious, wrought by ignorance, and defended by specious apologetics that dismiss the realities of life in America while hearkening to a time when life––and the Constitution and Bible––were considered perfect. But they're not. They never were. And claiming perfection where this is none leads to lies about reality. We need to stop lying to ourselves about so many things, because people are being shot dead on the streets of America, and it is lies of conservative ideology that are killing them.

*https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/06/07/fact-check-firearms-leading-cause-death-children/7529783001/

Christopher Cudworth is a journalist and former editorial writer. His newest book, Honest to Goodness: Why Christianity Needs a Reality Check and How to Make It Happen is being officially released on July 15. Advance copies are available now.