Last Wednesday, the New York Times ran an opinion article by Theresa Brown entitled “The Human Cost of the Second Amendment.” In her piece, Brown offers an oft-overlooked viewpoint on the gun control/Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) argument: that of nurses. As a oncology nurse with friends working the trauma units, she explains that guns have devastating effects—“many [victims of gun violence] never fully recover,” she says—and asks opponents of gun control to “Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence — the lucky survivors — as they come in bloody and terrified.” Her point is graphic yet valid, and in the past few days has led me to do some gun-related thinking of my own.
At home, my family members and I sometimes mock the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument by walking up to one another and shouting something along the lines of, “I’M KILLING YOU!” or making a gun-shaped hand gesture and yelling “BANG!” Unsurprisingly, nobody ends up dead and we all have a good laugh because, let’s face it, the phrase “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a pretty silly argument. Of course guns kill people. People also kill people, using different weapons and even their bare hands, but a gun certainly is a killing tool.
As a constitutional scholar, though, things get tricky. I’m a huge proponent of the Bill of Rights (…wait, is anybody not a huge proponent of the Bill of Rights?), especially the Ninth Amendment, which says that the rights listed in the first ten amendments don’t deny or disparage any other rights of the people; however, being pro-Bill of Rights means accepting the validity of the Second Amendment. I suppose one could argue that he or she believes in the entire Bill of Rights except for the Second Amendment, but I’m of the belief that the first ten amendments as a whole are important and meaningful. Thus, I do indeed find the Second Amendment valid… at face value. When looking at the text of the amendment using the practice of “originalism” that Justices Scalia and Thomas are so fond of, one realizes that the “arms” of the Founding Fathers are not the “arms” of today. The right to bear “arms” back in 1789 meant the right to own a musket—a decidedly less deadly weapon than the ones that caused the Denver movie-theater shooting this summer or the Gabby Giffords shooting last year—and to defend yourself against intruders/Redcoats. Weaponry nowadays has evolved to the point where owning a gun may mean an opportunity for self-defense against violent attackers, but it also may mean an opportunity for some very sick individual to go crazy and do a good deal of harm to innocents.
With this background information in mind, I agree with the idea that, in the spirit of the Second Amendment as the Framers of the Constitution would have interpreted it, people should be allowed to defend themselves. As a woman, when I walk alone to my dorm room late at night on sketchily-lit Providence streets, I often wish that I had a can of Mace with me just in case something goes wrong. Mace can be considered “arms,” as it serves a weaponlike purpose and can indeed do harm/injury to an attacker. What Mace cannot do, though, is irreparably and irrevocably damage another person’s body to the point where he or she may never fully recover from the attack. If you just read that sentence and thought, “That’s true! A gun can inflict that kind of damage upon a fellow human being, and the thought of sending someone to the hospital with serious gun wounds from a weapon I own because of the Second Amendment is a bit troubling,” then congratulations, it seems that you don’t have sociopathic tendencies. The idea of permanently harming someone in a violent conflict should make you uncomfortable, because logical thinking and social mores both indicate that damaging another person is wrong.
The very human, very universal concept of “hurting someone else, especially greviously or fatally, is wrong” is what drives much of the pro-gun control movement. Many outspoken members of the anti-gun control claim that proponents of gun control are trying to “restrict their Second Amendment right” or “regulate a right protected by the Constitution.” In a way, yes, I am trying to regulate a right granted to you by the Second Amendment. On the other hand, I am also trying to prevent violent outbursts like Columbine or the Trayvon Martin incident from happening again because guns, when used in conjunction with that kind of manic, unhinged behavior, do serious/permanent/frightening damage to our fellow countrymen.
Think about it this way—the First Amendment gives us the right to assembly, but protesters at Kent State and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago were arrested (whether rightly or wrongly is up to you) and accosted because their assemblies turned violent. Or, to use a different clause in the First Amendment, we as Americans are granted freedom of religion. There exists, however, separation between church and state. The laws that keep our government secular are, in fact, regulations that might infringe on one’s freedom to worship whatever he or she may choose, but they also ensure that one religion does not dominate the political system and oppress the beliefs of others. There are all kinds of regulations on all kinds of rights, and regulating the Second Amendment right to bear arms is should not be such a problem.
To conclude, let me bring our focus back to Theresa Brown’s NYTimes article. She wants to remind anti-regulation gun fanatics that there is a human element to their “fight for their rights,” and that unchecked gun ownership could lead to dire, violent consequences. I, too, would like remind anti-regulation individuals to consider their fellow Americans and imagine what their lives would be like if someone close to them became seriously injured by a gun. However, the anti-regulation camp also needs to consider the true meaning of the Second Amendment and the broader scope of what they’re fighting for. By misguidedly protecting a right that doesn’t mean what they think it means, they’re enabling a culture of violence that can permanently change lives for the