A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The vast majority of us recognize the preceding sentence to be the Second Amendment. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court embarked on an exhaustive journey to tell us what the right to bear arms actually means in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision. I don’t want to bore you with the details of Justice Scalia’s historical examination of the text’s operative clause (“right of the people to keep and bear Arms”) and the prefatory clause (“well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”), but let’s just agree that at the time the Second Amendment was passed, people understood there to be a right to bear arms outside of a military setting for defense of self and home.
The same argument always arises when it comes to the Second Amendment. That argument goes something like: “gun violence is so prevalent that we must curb the ability of people to acquire them”. The District of Columbia has a huge problem with gun violence. The dissent in Heller correctly pointed out that the issue of gun violence in D.C. deserved some sort of remedy. The question of how to deal with gun violence is what prompted the decision in Heller. D.C. basically decided to impose a ban on possession of handguns. Possession of an unregistered gun was illegal and the registration of handguns was prohibited. Lawfully possessed handguns had to be unloaded and disassembled.
I’ll start my quick analysis of the case and gun violence by stating that nowhere in the Second Amendment does it give people free reign to be violent. Gun violence is a terrible thing. I’m pretty sure that many of us have some sort of connection with someone who has been affected by gun violence. Three years ago, I lost a close family member to gun violence. It doesn’t change my opinion that there is a right to bear arms in the household for self defense.
The core of the problem in our society is the prevalence of violence. Violent crime statistics are extraordinary across the United States especially in urban areas. Many of these crimes are perpetrated with guns. I’m not sure that anyone would accuse law-abiding citizens as being the ones committing these crimes because law-abiding citizens are often the ones that are harmed as a result of these crimes. People were violent way before the Second Amendment codified the right to bear arms. This reality created an understanding that it was necessary to protect the ability of good people to defend themselves. Denying good citizens the right to defend themselves would not solve the issue of violence in this country. Guns aren’t the problem, human nature is.
I once saw a bumper sticker that read: IF GUNS KILL PEOPLE, THEN PENS SPELL WORDS WRONG. Enough said!
Drew is a 3L and can be reached at
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