Protestors demand stricter gun laws at a New York City march.
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This is now understood as the right of an American citizen to keep a weapon in their home, and the Supreme Court upheld this interpretation in 2008. A decade later, as mass shootings have become commonplace, change is necessary. The repeal of the Second Amendment is the key to this change.
When arguing for gun control, democratic politicians and other advocates consistently defend Americans’ Second Amendment rights. The insistence on the amendment’s contemporary necessity seems nonsensical when put into historical context. At the time of the Constitution’s writing, America had no standing army and relied on militias for its defense, making the right to bear arms necessary to guarantee the nation’s protection against slave uprisings, insurrections, or the invasion of a foreign power. However, the founding fathers were not all-knowing. How could they have predicted that two centuries later, the U.S. would not only have a “standing army,” but we’d be the world’s largest spender on defense?
Moreover, the arms that the founding fathers were referring to were of a completely different breed. Revolution-era muskets were capable of shooting one round at a time and three rounds per minute. A typical AR-15 has a magazine capacity of 30 rounds and can fire 45 rounds per minute, making it capable of producing carnage unimaginable to the Constitution’s writers. My argument should not be mistaken as one in favor of making gun ownership illegal. Countries such as the UK and Australia have gun regulations that have all but stopped mass shootings without outlawing gun ownership. It is the universal constitutional guarantee of an American’s right to own a gun that I disagree with.
Rather than banning guns, we must be more discriminative about who is allowed to own these deadly weapons and what type of weapons should be on the market. As long as they continue to be universally guaranteed, this discrimination can be seen as unconstitutional. People who are properly trained and whose mental health can be vouched for may be allowed to own a handgun or a rifle to be used for sporting or self-defense. However, the status quo, under which the Las Vegas shooter purchased 33 firearms in one year (including 12 weapons that functioned as fully automatic) before killing 58 people and injuring 851, is deeply misguided.
Though I don’t question the intelligence of our founding fathers and the document that they authored, we must not forget that they were men, not gods. The twenty-first amendment, which repealed prohibition, sets a historical precedent for the repeal of amendments that have proved to be mistaken or outmoded. Though addressing a freedom granted by the Bill of Rights may seem drastic, are the lives of the 13,000 people killed each year in gun homicides not worth it? Is it not a basic freedom for a child to feel safe at school? This seemingly “drastic” measure is necessary to end the gun violence epidemic.
