Compromising on the Second Amendment

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

For years, we have been subjected to an endless barrage of claims that the NRA and the gun lobby stubbornly resist any compromises on new gun control legislation. New restrictions, in whatever form, are invariably characterized by euphemisms such as “sensible” and “reasonable.”

Of course the invocation of these terms presumes what must be demonstrated: Whether any new gun control laws, rules and regulations are indeed sensible and reasonable, and will achieve their stated goal of reducing violent crime.

Suppose you have a neighbor who disputes the boundary line between your properties. He wants to move it 10 feet so that your property is diminished and his enlarged. After a heated argument, you compromise on five feet, shake hands and go home. But the next day, the same neighbor is back with a demand that the new property line is also improper.

This time, he demands that it be moved 20 feet. Again, you compromise by splitting the difference and settling on 10 feet. You’re unhappy with losing your property, but are willing to surrender some land so as to maintain peace.

But when the same neighbor returns yet again and demands the property line be moved 50 feet, you suddenly realize he’s not interested in compromise at all. He wants all your property, and all the compromises and concessions you made merely emboldened and encouraged his criminal depredations.

So it’s been with the Second Amendment. In 1934, the first significant federal gun control law, the National Firearms Act, established strict controls on machine guns, suppressors and short-barreled rifles. The Gun Control Act of 1968 required that all gun purchases go through federally licensed dealers.

In 1986, the Hughes Amendment banned the sale of new machine guns. The Brady Act of 1993 required that every person who purchased a gun from a licensed dealer pass a background check and receive government approval.

If you think all of the laws I cited above are reasonable and consistent with the Second Amendment, try comparing firearms with the treatment of books under the First Amendment. If anyone were even to suggest that publishers be licensed by the government, dangerous books banned, or that individuals had to receive government permission before buying a book, people would turn purple and smoke would come out of their ears.

Yet the Second Amendment clearly and unambiguously asserts that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s pretty strong language. And surely no educated person is ignorant enough to believe that guns are inherently more dangerous than books and ideas.

After 84 years of appeasements and concessions on Second Amendment rights, the cry for new restrictions is now louder than ever. It ought to be apparent that the only thing we have achieved is to encourage further encroachments on our liberties and rights.

Furthermore, no prohibition on firearms has ever achieved its stated goal of reducing crime. There’s something else afoot.

The claim that we must have gun control to reduce crime is an utterly transparent lie. There are about half-a-million legal machine guns in private hands in the U.S. I can’t recall a single instance in which one of these weapons was ever used in a crime. Yet new sales were completely banned by the 1986 Hughes Amendment. Why?

According to the FBI, in 2015, 6,447 people were killed by handguns. The total number of people killed by rifles of all types was only 252, less than half the number of people (624) murdered by means of “hands, fists, and feet.” Yet the current obsession is not to ban handguns, but to outlaw AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles.

The chasm here between rhetoric and reality ought to tell you immediately that the true goal is not to reduce homicides, but to destroy the constitutional militia that is the ultimate safeguard of liberty and constitutional order. If the Second Amendment goes, the United States is done. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we would admit that half the Second Amendment has already been whittled away.

Can we compromise on guns? Of course we can. From the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, through the implementation of the National Firearms Act in 1934, we had a solution that worked. People were allowed to purchase any gun they wanted, but those who misused them were punished. We can compromise on firearms, but never on fundamental liberties.

• David Deming is professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the series “Science and Technology in World History.”