Guns to the right of us,
Guns to the left of us.
Into the Valley of Death we go.
Someone has blundered.
The United States has more gun murders per capita than any other country in the developed world. There are more guns in circulation than our entire population. Barely a day goes buy without coverage of some ghastly gun murder.
The blunderers in this instance are clearly the five members of the Supreme Court of the United States who managed to change a Second Amendment provision designed to protect “well regulated [militias]” of a kind we no longer have into a general right of individuals to own and bear arms. The founders must be spinning in their graves to see the result of their sloppy drafting.
The simple solution to our gun problem is for the states to make ownership of guns a “privilege” like the right to drive. In every state I know of, a license to drive is issued after an examination of the applicant’s background and his or her knowledge of the law relating to driving, not to mention skill behind the wheel. Moreover, usually the right to drive includes a mandatory requirement that the driver obtain insurance against injuries resulting from the licensee’s driving. The issuance of insurance is not automatic. The insurance companies have the right to determine when they will issue insurance and at what cost. So let it be with gun ownership.
Whether this proposal will pass the scrutiny of the present Supreme Court I do not know. However, there is always hope that the court may reverse a foolish decision. It has certainly done so before. Consider its action in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when the court unanimously reversed its previous holding in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy had created the notion that there was no violation of civil rights if there was access to a public facility that was equal to a facility denied to members of the black race. In other words, it created the doctrine of separate but equal. The Brown case established that separate but equal was itself unconstitutional.
My father, who was a lawyer, throughout my childhood constantly repeated to me the great Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s quote: ”The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”
Perhaps when the issue comes up again, the court will consider our experience of the horrible damage its previous gun rulings have done to our society. Let us pray.
Arthur Joel Katz, who generally goes by ‘Joel,’ is a Lower Saucon Township resident. In addition to Saucon Source he has written for Hellertown-Lower Saucon Patch and the former Saucon News. He is the author of the novel “Making Harriet.”