According the Congressional Research Service and military historians, more than 1,300,000 American soldiers have been killed in combat in more than seventy-five foreign adventures, wars, including the Indian Wars, occupations and other military expeditions since the Revolutionary War. The Civil War and World War II saw, by far, the largest number of fatalities.
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During the Civil War, in response to the threat posed by the
Confederacy, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas
corpus and authorized federal militias to try and to imprison suspected
Confederate sympathizers.
In response to the need to mobilize
in World War I and World War II, Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, with
Congressional authorization, renewed military conscription, and
converted the U.S. economy into a command economy in which goods and
services for civilian use were severely rationed and manufacturers were
directed to convert their production lines for military use.
In addition, during World War I, the government of the United States
prosecuted citizens simply because they publicly expressed their
opposition to the military draft and the U.S. entry into the war. In Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), the United States Supreme Court gave its imprimatur
to the prosecution of Charles Schenck, Secretary of the Socialist Party
of the United States, under the Espionage Act of 1917 for having
printed and distributed anti-war leaflets. In an often quoted statement
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who authored the court's unanimous
decision, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not
protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a
panic."
During World War II, thousands of American citizens
of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in internment camps without having
been charged or prosecuted for any wrongdoing. In the infamous case of Korematsu v. United States,
323 U.S. 214 (1944), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of the exective order that authorized these mass
arrests.
On September 11, 2001, 2,726 people were killed in
the attack upon the World Trade Center in New York City. To address a
perceived threat of terrorism from Muslim extremists, President Bush and
the Congress of the United States instituted a series of draconian
policies, captioned as the Patriot Act. That legislation, which
President Obama and the current Congress continue to support, granted
federal agencies broad powers to interrogate suspected terrorists,
eavesdrop on private communications and created a gigantic new federal
department, Homeland Security.
In the fiscal year 2011, the
DHS was given a budget of $98.8 billion and employed more than 200,000
individuals. Despite serious concerns upon about infringements of First,
Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court has
declined to find any significant provisions of the Patriot Act to be
unconstitutional.
Since 1960, more than one million Americans
have died in firearm-related suicides, homicides, and unintentional
injuries, according to the Violence Policy Center. In the seven years
after September 11, 2001, ninety-nine thousand people were murdered in
the United States. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that
more than 30,000 people are killed by guns in the United States every
year, or an average of 82 gun deaths per day.
The political
and judicial response to this extraordinary and escalating massacre of
American citizens stands in a stark contrast to the government's
previous responses to domestic and external threats. Elected officials
at the federal, state and local levels have refused to enact sensible
gun regulations as they have been cowered by threats of political
reprisals from the National Rifle Association and single-issue voters.
The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia, et al v. Heller,
128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) has exacerbated the crisis. 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" -is indicative of the ideological
bias that Scalia and his four right-wing colleagues exhibit along with
so many elected officials, gun manufacturers, sellers and gun owners.
Their commitment to outdated and positively harmful notions of
eighteenth century individualism is so complete that they have become
oblivious to the primary duties of any government: to ensure public
safety and to protect its citizens against violence. In the name of an
abstract right of solitary individuals to purchase and possess guns, the
right of concrete human beings - who have died and will continue to die
because of gun violence- to be safe from harm is denied: "We are aware
of the problem of gun violence in this country, "Justice Scalia piously
intoned, "but the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily
takes certain policy choices off the table."
Surely no
abstract constitutional claim, no matter how broadly framed or
inaccurately construed, can possibly trump the most precious and
fundament right of every human being: the right to life itself. A
government which will not - or can not - restrain the continuing carnage
wrought by murderers who have been given license to purchase guns
deserves to forfeit any claims to loyalty by its citizens.
