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An Explanation for My English Friends
Apr. 17th, 2007 04:19 pmIt's not that simple. 80% of Americans are in favor of much stricter gun-control laws - only there's no easy way to make that happen, thanks to legal precedent. That is, although the second amendment to the constitution says "right to bear arms in a well-regulated militia," the courts have traditionally interpreted it to mean that if it's even remotely plausible that someone could be using a gun for hunting or sport, the government is not allowed to do much more than require a licence and a waiting period. Much like British Common Law, once people start interpreting law one way, that intepretation carries the full force of law, regardless of how it was initially written. I've actually heard someone argue that the amendment should be interpreted to mean that the government can't regulate non-militia owned guns at all.
These legal precedents are partly thanks to a powerful gun lobby that has the time and money to take every case to court with very good lawyers, but that's the way our court system works and has always worked. There's no way around it short of dismantling a branch of our government and rebuilding it from the ground up - no easy thing in such a huge country. Bear in mind that we're the oldest democratic government in the world and have been operating according to the same constitution for more than 200 years; a lot of the legal mechanisms we're building from were originally intended for a vastly different population - one that was a lot more rural, and that did not have anywhere near universal sufferage. We have not had any clean slate moments; we never had to deal with invasion by Napoleon, Nazis, or Communists. We've never had to start again. In terms of government age, we're kind of like pensioners trying to use the internet.
We could in theory modify the Constitution to "take back" the Second Amendment. We've only taken back an amendment once, and it wasn't in the Bill of Rights - it was the amendment which banned the sale and consumption of alcohol (and in the process massively empowered organized crime). Honestly, we're pretty embarassed about that - both about the Prohibition amendment and about taking it back. It makes us touchy about adding more amendments. We also have deliberately made it difficult to do so - otherwise, the amendments would mean nothing, and people could easily take away things like our freedom of speech, or our right not to have soldiers quartered in our houses, or our right to vote. If we want to alter the Constitution, more than two thirds of both houses of Congress have to vote in support of the amendment, and then 75% of the state governments have to sign off on it within seven years. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, realize that we've only amended the constitution 17 times since 1798.
To further complicate matters, America is a federalized system. America's gun laws tend to be decided state by state. Virginia's guns are probably the least regulated in the country. Each state is also able to charge its own income tax, define marriage and divorce laws, require and provide differing levels of health insurance, set speed limits and emissions laws, and decide what is taught in public schools. As an analogy, "America needs better gun control laws" is a bit like "The EU needs to cut it out with the crazy farm subsidies" - you're talking about a government overseeing other governments which can be touchy about protecting their own interests. (In this analogy, Virginia equals France.) Moreover, gun laws are difficult and expensive to enforce - note the prevalence of gun violence in London, where guns are most definitely illegal, or the ease with which people there and here are able to score various illegal drugs.
So, yep, pretty much all of us are unhappy about the easy availability of semi-automatic weapons and high-powered rifles. We don't like it. But it's something that to a large extent we just have to live with, like paying taxes, or incurring massive national debt to support a war very few of us favor. While it is theoretically possible to change things, it'll take a long, long, long time, and lots of money and lots of effort, and honestly, we're still worried about things like the war and how weak the dollar is and legalizing gay marriage, and that's taking up most of our crusading protest energy. I'd also like to note that while it might not seem fair or right that we have weak gun controls when most citizens want strong ones ... well, most citizens were also against desegregation, interratial marriage, and women's suffrage. While it's not the same, it's similar enough to make the ethics complicated.
This leaves us in the same situation we've always had, where guns are legal, but killing people isn't. (I'd certainly rather it was that way than the reverse. Honestly, is killing someone with a gun any worse than killing someone with a bomb, or running them down with a car, or a chainsaw, or any of the other horrible things you could do?) I don't like guns, I don't want them around, and I never want to get shot. But it's fairly misguided to think that the reason they're legal in the U.S. is because we're irresponsible yahoos obsessed with our virility.
These legal precedents are partly thanks to a powerful gun lobby that has the time and money to take every case to court with very good lawyers, but that's the way our court system works and has always worked. There's no way around it short of dismantling a branch of our government and rebuilding it from the ground up - no easy thing in such a huge country. Bear in mind that we're the oldest democratic government in the world and have been operating according to the same constitution for more than 200 years; a lot of the legal mechanisms we're building from were originally intended for a vastly different population - one that was a lot more rural, and that did not have anywhere near universal sufferage. We have not had any clean slate moments; we never had to deal with invasion by Napoleon, Nazis, or Communists. We've never had to start again. In terms of government age, we're kind of like pensioners trying to use the internet.
We could in theory modify the Constitution to "take back" the Second Amendment. We've only taken back an amendment once, and it wasn't in the Bill of Rights - it was the amendment which banned the sale and consumption of alcohol (and in the process massively empowered organized crime). Honestly, we're pretty embarassed about that - both about the Prohibition amendment and about taking it back. It makes us touchy about adding more amendments. We also have deliberately made it difficult to do so - otherwise, the amendments would mean nothing, and people could easily take away things like our freedom of speech, or our right not to have soldiers quartered in our houses, or our right to vote. If we want to alter the Constitution, more than two thirds of both houses of Congress have to vote in support of the amendment, and then 75% of the state governments have to sign off on it within seven years. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, realize that we've only amended the constitution 17 times since 1798.
To further complicate matters, America is a federalized system. America's gun laws tend to be decided state by state. Virginia's guns are probably the least regulated in the country. Each state is also able to charge its own income tax, define marriage and divorce laws, require and provide differing levels of health insurance, set speed limits and emissions laws, and decide what is taught in public schools. As an analogy, "America needs better gun control laws" is a bit like "The EU needs to cut it out with the crazy farm subsidies" - you're talking about a government overseeing other governments which can be touchy about protecting their own interests. (In this analogy, Virginia equals France.) Moreover, gun laws are difficult and expensive to enforce - note the prevalence of gun violence in London, where guns are most definitely illegal, or the ease with which people there and here are able to score various illegal drugs.
So, yep, pretty much all of us are unhappy about the easy availability of semi-automatic weapons and high-powered rifles. We don't like it. But it's something that to a large extent we just have to live with, like paying taxes, or incurring massive national debt to support a war very few of us favor. While it is theoretically possible to change things, it'll take a long, long, long time, and lots of money and lots of effort, and honestly, we're still worried about things like the war and how weak the dollar is and legalizing gay marriage, and that's taking up most of our crusading protest energy. I'd also like to note that while it might not seem fair or right that we have weak gun controls when most citizens want strong ones ... well, most citizens were also against desegregation, interratial marriage, and women's suffrage. While it's not the same, it's similar enough to make the ethics complicated.
This leaves us in the same situation we've always had, where guns are legal, but killing people isn't. (I'd certainly rather it was that way than the reverse. Honestly, is killing someone with a gun any worse than killing someone with a bomb, or running them down with a car, or a chainsaw, or any of the other horrible things you could do?) I don't like guns, I don't want them around, and I never want to get shot. But it's fairly misguided to think that the reason they're legal in the U.S. is because we're irresponsible yahoos obsessed with our virility.
