This morning's mass shooting in Indianapolis reminds us again of the continuing epidemic of gun violence that ur Congressmen and Supreme Court jurists refuse to address. As of April 16, 2021, the Gun Violence Archive reports that 147 mass shootings have occurred so far in 2021.Every day, 342 people in the United States are victims of gun violence in murders, assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Between 1968 and 2017, more than 1.5 million Americans died in gun-related incidents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number exceeds the approximately 1.2 million service members who have been killed in every war in U.S. history, based upon estimates from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The emotional and economic losses caused by these gun deaths and injuries, as well as the emotional travail and suffering inflicted upon the families, friends and neighbors of the victims, are incalculable and the cumulative effects of this violence upon our entire society are pervasive. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 59 dead and hundreds wounded, CBS Moneywatch's Aimee Picchi wrote that, "gun violence in the U.S. also has an enormous financial cost, rippling through the economy in the form of lost wages, medical bills, higher taxes for law enforcement and lower property values, among other factors. Some estimates put the total annual tab of shootings at well over $100 billion, while others put it even higher." A senior staff attorney at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Michael McLively, was quoted by Picchi, "The usual discussion is: There's a mass shooting, we talk about political inaction, and then everyone turns to the next thing that's happening or next disaster. The cost of gun violence goes undiscussed, and it's super important because it's silently affecting everyone." According to the Law Center, researchers conservatively estimate that gun violence costs the American economy at least $229 billion every year, including $8.6 billion in direct expenses such as for emergency and medical care.
The inability of this country's political and judicial institutions to address this problem has been exacerbated by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). Prior to the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Heller, the Second Amendment had always been held by the federal courts 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. See, for example, U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939).
Sadly, the late 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"--were an unfortunate consequence of the eighteenth-century ideological bias in which his legal analysis was mired. In the name of an abstract right of the individual and his putative right to own a gun, Scalia denied 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."
Scalia's unbridled defense of anti-social individualism has since given license to gun nuts and Second Amendment absolutists to thwart every rational effort to control the continuing slaughter of innocent citizens. While most GOP legislators at the federal, state and local levels have enthusiastically embraced the mantra of the NRA that "guns don't kill people, people do," too many Democratic legislators have been cowed into submission.
How does one explain this insanity? Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the liberal ethos of the country in which the Founders intentionally constructed a constitutional system that emphasized the rights of solitary individuals over those of the community and, by means of checks and balances, separation of powers, and a diffusion of political power across a porous, largely unaccountable federal system, signaled a permanent distrust of government and its ability to act as an positive instrument for the public good.
Protecting the lives and safety of innocent citizens the paramount duty of any democratic government. The right of citizens to live meaningful and productive lives without the fear or threat of senseless violence perpetrated by sociopaths and the deranged is a basic human right that trumps any narrow, inflexible interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Unless the problem of gun violence is addressed honestly, openly and courageously by judges and politicians, the number and severity of incidents of senseless gun violence will continue to increase. Will this country then descend into the kind of dystopia described by Hobbes, in which the "life of man is poore, nasty, brutish and short?" If that dark, future world should come to pass, those jurists and politicians who now oppose all rational forms of gun control will ruefully be remembered as craven cowards who spawned a culture of dearth,
As citizens of a putative democracy we, too, now have a solemn responsibility. We must demand through collective action, that local officials, law enforcement, including police departments and their unions, support sensible gun control. In addition, we should support all legislative efforts by Democratic candidates for Congressional office and for President to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court to eleven or thirteen judges. Such a change would help to ensure that the Heller decision is reversed and that the Supreme Court would become more responsive to the will of the American people rather than than the right-wing ideological agenda of the Federalist Society.