The attempted assassination of Congress woman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six innocents, including a federal district judge, should remind all of us of our continued vulnerability in this culture of lawlessness in which we live.
Today, the United States remains among the most violent and crime-ridden countries in the developed world. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, during the period between January and December 2006, more than 75 million crimes were reported to police and law enforcement officials at all levels of government. Given a U.S. population which consisted of an estimated 303,824,646 inhabitants as of July 2008, this statistic is quite startling. Further, the number of violent crimes, including murder, robbery and burglary increased approximately 1.3 percent.
Of the total of reported crimes in 2006, almost 22 million occurred in non-metropolitan areas. In addition, as of 2006, the number of adult and juvenile prisoners in federal and state correctional institutions numbered 2,050,205, of whom 1,853,386 were men and 196, 820 were women. By 2008, the United States had the dubious distinction of having, by far, the highest rate of incarceration in the entire world: 2.3 million Americans were imprisoned, which amounted to one in 100 adults, one in fifteen black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four, and one out of every thirty-six Hispanic males.
Easy access to firearms is a major contributor to the epidemic of violence which has gripped U.S. culture. According to the Violence Policy Center, more than one million Americans have died in firearm-related suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries since 1960. In the seven years after September 11, 2001, ninety-nine thousand people were murdered in the United States. Sadly, the inability of government to prevent gun deaths by reducing the availability of these weapons is often excused based upon a misreading of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Until recently, that amendment had universally been construed to grant to the people--and not to individuals--the right to keep and bear arms as members of a well-regulated militia (today's National Guard) as previously confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia, et al v. Heller, illustrates the intellectual stranglehold that a political philosophy based upon anti-social individualism exerts upon current federal jurisprudence. Justice Scalia's tortured constitutional analysis and his inability to comprehend the grammatical interconnection between a subordinate clause in a sentence --"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."--and the main clause--"... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"--are an unfortunate consequence of the ideological bias in which his legal analysis remains mired.
Scalia's bias--his commitment to eighteenth century notions of individualism--is so complete that he ignores the primary duty of a government --to protect its own citizens. In the name of an abstract right of the individual and his putative right to own a gun, Scalia denies the right of concrete human beings--who have died and will continue to die because of handgun violence--to be safe from harm: "We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country," Scalia piously intoned, "but the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table."
The mindset exemplified by Justice Scalia and the enormous success of powerful lobbyists such as the National Rifle Association--whose incantations are often echoed by equally reactionary federal judges and legislators who compound that confusion--ensures that incidents of gun violence, including massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, and now in Tucson, will inevitably increase.
Today, the United States remains among the most violent and crime-ridden countries in the developed world. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, during the period between January and December 2006, more than 75 million crimes were reported to police and law enforcement officials at all levels of government. Given a U.S. population which consisted of an estimated 303,824,646 inhabitants as of July 2008, this statistic is quite startling. Further, the number of violent crimes, including murder, robbery and burglary increased approximately 1.3 percent.
Of the total of reported crimes in 2006, almost 22 million occurred in non-metropolitan areas. In addition, as of 2006, the number of adult and juvenile prisoners in federal and state correctional institutions numbered 2,050,205, of whom 1,853,386 were men and 196, 820 were women. By 2008, the United States had the dubious distinction of having, by far, the highest rate of incarceration in the entire world: 2.3 million Americans were imprisoned, which amounted to one in 100 adults, one in fifteen black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four, and one out of every thirty-six Hispanic males.
Easy access to firearms is a major contributor to the epidemic of violence which has gripped U.S. culture. According to the Violence Policy Center, more than one million Americans have died in firearm-related suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries since 1960. In the seven years after September 11, 2001, ninety-nine thousand people were murdered in the United States. Sadly, the inability of government to prevent gun deaths by reducing the availability of these weapons is often excused based upon a misreading of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Until recently, that amendment had universally been construed to grant to the people--and not to individuals--the right to keep and bear arms as members of a well-regulated militia (today's National Guard) as previously confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia, et al v. Heller, illustrates the intellectual stranglehold that a political philosophy based upon anti-social individualism exerts upon current federal jurisprudence. Justice Scalia's tortured constitutional analysis and his inability to comprehend the grammatical interconnection between a subordinate clause in a sentence --"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."--and the main clause--"... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"--are an unfortunate consequence of the ideological bias in which his legal analysis remains mired.
Scalia's bias--his commitment to eighteenth century notions of individualism--is so complete that he ignores the primary duty of a government --to protect its own citizens. In the name of an abstract right of the individual and his putative right to own a gun, Scalia denies the right of concrete human beings--who have died and will continue to die because of handgun violence--to be safe from harm: "We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country," Scalia piously intoned, "but the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table."
The mindset exemplified by Justice Scalia and the enormous success of powerful lobbyists such as the National Rifle Association--whose incantations are often echoed by equally reactionary federal judges and legislators who compound that confusion--ensures that incidents of gun violence, including massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, and now in Tucson, will inevitably increase.
An armed Society, is a polite Society.