When it comes to the subject of gun control in the United States, my personal views had been largely shaped by a man named Joseph Story. He was an Associate Supreme Court Justice from 1811 to 1845, and he recorded his views on the Second Amendment in “Commentaries on the Constitution.” He began by defending the wisdom of a militia as “the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions,” but went on to discuss the dangers of any divergence from a “well-regulated militia.” In his mind, there was a huge difference between an organized (and trained) militia and a disorderly band of untrained civilians bearing arms. His fear was that the American people would depart from the former and move towards the latter.
He saw this possibility as a very real danger to our country. He feared that, if this departure were to take place, the protection and security that the Second Amendment was intended to supply would be overturned.
Try bringing this up to an American who loves their individual liberties, and they might give you a speech about self-defense and keeping the government in check. Or they might throw this one at you, as I recently discovered:
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
With that, my views on gun control shifted. In defiance of all odds, I had somehow managed to make it through 21 years of life without the benefit of this groundbreaking pearl of wisdom to guide me. Here I was, plunged in the deepest circle of ignorance, thinking that unmanned firearms were floating around releasing ammunition on innocents. Finally, I had been cured of the chronic idiocy that subtracted the human element from the equation of murder. Finally, my eyes were opened and I saw that guns were not the problem at all.
I saw that people were the problem. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are killed in intentional homicides. Some are committed with knives, blunt objects or bare hands. The majority are committed with guns. This may have, in part, been the source of my profound confusion. But as soon as I had come to understand that a human being must pull the trigger in order for a gun to become a killing device, I could let go of my unnecessary paranoia that the relative ease with which a human being may acquire a gun in our country could prove dangerous. Because guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
And I could finally let go of my fear of a weapon that increases the speed and efficiency with which a life can be taken; I could let go of my fear that accessibility of this quickness and efficiency could enable homicide. It would be just as silly to say that the bomb played any role in the killing of hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or to say that the guillotine in any way led to the blood that ran through the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. It was just people, right? Having access to devices that made it easy to kill people en masse had nothing to do with it. Those things don’t kill people, right? People kill people.
Finally, I could fully appreciate my Second Amendment rights, free of any petty fear that by clinging to these rights I was perpetuating a dangerously archaic view of arming civilians. These are the fears of oppressive fascists who want to crush our individual liberties by being overly-conscientious of things like “public safety” and “the general welfare.”
The intellectual tradition of Joseph Story has continued into the present day. Take, for instance, Justice John Paul Stevens. During the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, he argued that the amendment protects the right to bear arms only in relation to an organized militia.
“Had the Framers wished to expand the meaning of the phrase ‘bear arms’ to encompass civilian possession and use,” he said, “they could have done so by the addition of phrases such as ‘for the defense of themselves.’”
But we love our individual liberties. You can nitpick at the Constitution all you want, but we want our guns and we want them for our selves, not for a state or a militia.
And why should we not? After all, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. So why not give people guns?
