The senseless slaughter of twenty small children in Newtown,
Connecticut and six adults is not the first act of horrendous gun
violence in the United States. Since Charles Whitman's murder of 14
people at the University of Texas-Austin in 1966, gun violence in this
country has continued to escalate as the ownership of assault weapons
and ever larger magazines and gun clips has become common place. The
carnage at Columbine in 1999, at Virginia Tech in 2007, and at Aurora in
July of 2012 serve as gruesome reminders that the political and legal
institutions of the United States have become utterly dysfunctional.
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,128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) illustrates the ideological stranglehold that a political philosophy based upon anti-social individualism exerts upon current interpretations of constitutional 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 ignored the primary duty of a government --to ensure public safety and to protect its citizens against violence. 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 gun 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."
Although Justice Scalia and the other four right wing jurists who joined him in the Heller case claimed to base their jurisprudence upon fidelity to the original intent of the framers of the constitution, the decision in Heller neglects a central reason why the Articles of Confederation was abandoned and a new constitution was adopted. The majority in Heller also disregarded the historical evidence: a government that cannot ensure the safety of the public will, inevitably, lose its legitimacy and ultimately cease to exist.
The mind-set exemplified by Justice Scalia and the enormous success of powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association - whose incantations are often echoed by equally reactionary federal judges and legislators who compound the confusion - ensure that incidents of gun violence, including massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, and now in Newton, will inevitably increase.
This week, The New York Times commented in an editorial ("Personal Guns And The Second Amendment," December 18, 2012)) that "The text of the Second Amendment creates no right to private possession of guns, but Justice Antonin Scalia found one in legal history for himself and the other four conservatives. He said the right is not outmoded even 'in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem.'"
The Times further observed that ,"It is not just liberals who have lambasted the ruling, but some prominent conservatives like Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The majority, he wrote, 'read an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment's enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the citizenry.' He said the court undermined 'conservative jurisprudence.'"
The tragedy in Newtown confirms the presence of evil in our society and the enormous toll that it continues to extract. Evil, however, is not an elusive, abstract phenomenon. Rather, it manifests itself in a myriad of acts by thoughtless, greedy, cruel, narcissistic or malevolent human beings who defend the indefensible because of their ignorance, an bizarre adherence to some putative constitutional right to own and possess weapons of mass destruction, because they profit from the manufacture and sale of these weapons, or simply because they enjoy mayhem or have become inured to the violence.
The massacre in Newtown occurred less than two weeks before Christmas, during a season that summons all of us to the simple message peace and love for one another. As such, the tragedy stands at the intersection between good and evil.
A quotation attributed to Edmund Burke reminds us that, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." If the right of anyone, without restriction, to purchase and acquire any number of weapons, no matter how destructive, becomes a core American value, the triumph of evil will be ensured because the rest of us - good men and women - were too timid or too preoccupied with our own selfish concerns to take concerted political action to end to the slaughter of innocents.
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,128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) illustrates the ideological stranglehold that a political philosophy based upon anti-social individualism exerts upon current interpretations of constitutional 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 ignored the primary duty of a government --to ensure public safety and to protect its citizens against violence. 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 gun 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."
Although Justice Scalia and the other four right wing jurists who joined him in the Heller case claimed to base their jurisprudence upon fidelity to the original intent of the framers of the constitution, the decision in Heller neglects a central reason why the Articles of Confederation was abandoned and a new constitution was adopted. The majority in Heller also disregarded the historical evidence: a government that cannot ensure the safety of the public will, inevitably, lose its legitimacy and ultimately cease to exist.
The mind-set exemplified by Justice Scalia and the enormous success of powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association - whose incantations are often echoed by equally reactionary federal judges and legislators who compound the confusion - ensure that incidents of gun violence, including massacres such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, and now in Newton, will inevitably increase.
This week, The New York Times commented in an editorial ("Personal Guns And The Second Amendment," December 18, 2012)) that "The text of the Second Amendment creates no right to private possession of guns, but Justice Antonin Scalia found one in legal history for himself and the other four conservatives. He said the right is not outmoded even 'in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem.'"
The Times further observed that ,"It is not just liberals who have lambasted the ruling, but some prominent conservatives like Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The majority, he wrote, 'read an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment's enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the citizenry.' He said the court undermined 'conservative jurisprudence.'"
The tragedy in Newtown confirms the presence of evil in our society and the enormous toll that it continues to extract. Evil, however, is not an elusive, abstract phenomenon. Rather, it manifests itself in a myriad of acts by thoughtless, greedy, cruel, narcissistic or malevolent human beings who defend the indefensible because of their ignorance, an bizarre adherence to some putative constitutional right to own and possess weapons of mass destruction, because they profit from the manufacture and sale of these weapons, or simply because they enjoy mayhem or have become inured to the violence.
The massacre in Newtown occurred less than two weeks before Christmas, during a season that summons all of us to the simple message peace and love for one another. As such, the tragedy stands at the intersection between good and evil.
A quotation attributed to Edmund Burke reminds us that, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." If the right of anyone, without restriction, to purchase and acquire any number of weapons, no matter how destructive, becomes a core American value, the triumph of evil will be ensured because the rest of us - good men and women - were too timid or too preoccupied with our own selfish concerns to take concerted political action to end to the slaughter of innocents.
