In the first half of this year, there were more than 330 mass shootings in the United States. (We Utahns are fortunate in that only one of them has occurred in our state.) Over the recent Fourth of July weekend, there were 22 mass shootings, resulting in 20 deaths and 126 wounded.
The U.S. has the highest number of civilian guns per capita in the world, and it’s not even close. As a consequence, we have more mass shootings, by far, than any other developed nation.
This is a trend that has been getting worse ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends to all citizens with few exceptions. That ruling was based on a dubious judicial theory known as “originalism.” The theory posits that modern-day judges should defer to the meaning of a statute as it was likely understood at the time of its enactment.
The Second Amendment reads as follows: “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.”
But according to those five conservative justices, only the last nine words mattered. They chose to simply ignore the first thirteen words. According to them, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed” meant that most every American citizen had the right to carry a gun wherever and whenever, with few exceptions. That ruling has become virtually sacrosanct, which is why we now lead the industrialized world in gun deaths.
In recent years, however, linguists have done massive historical research to determine exactly what the wording of the amendment likely did mean back in the day. Their main resource has been the 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English created at Brigham Young University, where they have identified some 1,500 uses of the phrase “bear arms” as it was understood back when the amendment was written.
In virtually every case, “bear arms” was used not in a civilian context but in a military one. So the Second Amendment right to bear arms was accorded only to citizens performing some military role, and the Founders made that clear by including the first part of the amendment, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State . . .”
It was hardly “irrelevant,” as those five conservative justices claimed. The Second Amendment right to bear arms refers only to military uses, not to civilian ones.
It’s tragic how a misinterpretation of the Constitution by five powerful men in robes — including three (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts) still on the court — can have such disastrous consequences. And with a partisan court and a polarized Congress, there’s virtually no practical way to change it for a long time to come.
Tom Huckin
Tom Huckin, professor emeritus at the University of Utah and longtime resident of Salt Lake City, likes to challenge conventional wisdom.
