Posted on 05/27/2023 7:37:10 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Since the 1970s, I’ve written editorials about what was then called “gun control.” In recent years, I largely passed over the subject.
Back then, it was unthinkable elementary school kids could be gunned down in a classroom, Bible classes and synagogues profaned, or that shopping malls, cinemas, restaurants and music festivals would see mass killing after mass killing.
After such slaughter – and the lack of any substantive response from our elected leaders – what can possibly be done?
It’s the wrong response. Now and again, something comes along to shock.
For me, it was a Sunday newspaper story where only one Maine delegation member, Rep. Chellie Pingree, who supports it, was willing to discuss the assault weapons ban that never gets through Congress, despite having been law from 1994-2004.
The others, Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, and Rep. Jared Golden – one Republican, one independent and one Democrat – though given two weeks, wouldn’t talk to the reporter, instead offering lame written statements.
Yet Collins once voted to renew the ban, and King, as a freshman senator, was outraged after the Newtown, Conn. massacre of second graders when the Senate couldn’t overcome a filibuster to begin debate.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Congress passed the Gun Control Act which banned mail-order rifle sales such as the one Lee Harvey Oswald obtained to murder President John F. Kennedy.
In Maine, Gov. Ken Curtis honored a pledge made at a National Governor’s Association conference to propose state legislation. At the hearing, hundreds of aroused hunters shouted down the bill, and its sponsor withdrew it.
But Curtis never expressed regret or second thoughts, though it doubtless didn’t help his re-election bid two years later, which he won by the tiniest of margins. It was the right thing to do.
In 2013, after the U.S. Senate’s disgraceful inaction, Dannel Malloy, now University of Maine System chancellor, then governor of Connecticut, proposed sweeping gun regulations, and got them passed, keeping lawmakers in session.
This didn’t improve his popularity, but the laws made Connecticut safer and less violent – as the nation could have been, had Congress acted.
The outlook for sensible gun restrictions today is bleak, but we can call out those who fail to act, or act regressively.
Gov. Janet Mills, as attorney general, fought a “red flag” law passed elsewhere that allows family members to request a judicial order removing firearms from someone who presents a danger to themselves or others.
Instead, she supported only a “yellow flag” law, predictably ineffective, that relies on law enforcement officers evaluating a person’s mental competency – something they’re unqualified for and understandably reluctant to do.
We must save our ire, though, for the U.S. Supreme Court and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, often admired on other subjects, who simply tore up two centuries of legal precedent to find an individual right to firearms in the Second Amendment that simply isn’t there.
Anyone who carefully reads the text understands this is a right to collective self-defense and has nothing to do with permissible carrying of high-powered weaponry on city streets, something the Framers could not have imagined and would certainly not have condoned.
The reaction to 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, with a 5-4 majority striking down the capital’s handgun ban, was curiously muted, with observers deciding “some restrictions” might still pass muster.
Building on Heller, last June Justice Clarence Thomas enthusiastically invalidated concealed weapons permits in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a precedent the Courts of Appeals are busily applying already.
One has to wonder how much will remain. Will even the 1938 federal ban on fully automatic machine guns survive this “egregiously wrong” constitutional doctrine, to quote another recent opinion?
Barring a change in personnel or enlargement of the court, we may be stuck with Heller and Bruen, but that doesn’t mean we must remain silent.
The logic of this campaign is that guns=freedom, that the Second Amendment is on a par with the First Amendment, rather than being, as it is, a historical curiosity from when brand-new Americans wondered whether government could be trusted with their rights, privileges and immunities.
Even in other countries with “wild West” mythologies – Australia, New Zealand, Norway – mass shootings led to tighter gun laws. Only in the U.S. do guns=freedom.
We must stop deluding ourselves. Arming elementary school teachers won’t keep kids safe. Nor will handing out AR-15s to patrol officers.
Only when we’re willing to deescalate, and seek peaceful ways to live in community, will we begin to heal. And it does start with each one of us.
Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter since 1984. His new book, “Calm Command: U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller in His Times, 1888-1910, will be published later this year. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
The problem is...
It’s not OUR guns,
It’s YOUR sons.
I wonder if this clown ever thought of the time when kids brought their guns to school for target shooting or hunting activities before or after classes, all of that accompanied by basically no violent incidents.
Something tells me Mr Rooks writes this tripe in the hopes that his organs will be harvested last.
Want to stop most mass killings? Reopen the closed mental hospitals and bring back the 1950s standards for incarceration.
Almost all of the mass killers have telegraphed their mental illness well before going on a rampage.
And the AW ban was a joke.
Remember the Assault rifle ban?
It banned rifles by name.
It declared flash suppressors and bayonet lugs bad.(How many people died from bayonets since 1900?)
Folding stocks were bad
Extended magazines bad.
So the manufacturers changed the name of the rifles to “Target Rifle”
Removed the flash suppressor and bayonet lug.
Made the folding stock solid.
Added a 10 round magazine.
And the rifles were still for sale all through the ban.
Meanwhile there were still millions of high cap magazines in public hands.
“Guns guarantee my freedom from assholes like Douglas Rooks.”
I second that.
Something else we didn’t have back then... gun-free zones.
If the government says you don’t need a gun, CLEARLY, you need a gun!
When all the guns have been banned;
When all the words have been censored;
When all the history has been erased;
When all the FReedom has been taken;
Only then will you discover why our Right to Keep and Bear Arms was so high on the list!
The government wants to disarm us after 244 years because they plan to do things we would shoot them for!
LOL!
Maine is a Constitutional Carry state!
Whatshisface is a dumbass ignoramus!
The entire concept of, “government by consent,” only has meaning if that, “consent,” is truly voluntary. To that end, it is implicit that the ability to refuse or deny consent remains intact.
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