Turning the
right to bear arms
on its head
 
A law professor at Georgetown Univ. wants you to be free to "nourish your own spirit" by exercising your right to mutual disarmament.


        The September/October issue of TIKKUN magazine (which describes itself as "a bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture & society) contains at pp. 25-26 an essay entitled "Gun Rights" by Prof. Robin West of the Georgetown University Law Center.  Prof. West opens her essay by observing:

  The NRA, right-wing militias, gun sellers, owners, their lawyers, and
assorted political pundits all now quite routinely argue, and with growing
success, that every individual has a constitutional right to own guns under
the Second Amendment.  This argument, which ten years ago was
regarded as the rantings of the lunatic fringe, is now widely accepted not
only by gun owners and advocates but also by a handful of respected
liberal constitutional scholars and, more ominously, by at least one
federal district court judge.
        To liberals it's "ominous" when judges and liberal constitutional scholars accept the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right.  The reason Prof. West is so worried is that:
. . . simply as a matter of law, were the courts ever to accept the proposition
that an individual has a constitutionally protected right, under the Second
Amendment, to possess firearms (as a lower federal district court in Texas
has), such a right could invalidate even limited gun control legislation.

                                                                                  (italics added)

        Prof. West correctly observes that rights exist, "fundamentally, to protect the rights holder against precisely the sort of emotional and political intensity occasioned by events like Columbine."  In other words, a constitutional right can trump popular laws that unduly infringe upon that right.

        So far so good.  But then Prof. West starts talking about the "cost borne directly by our politics of meaning."  According to the professor, when Second Amendment rights are respected gun owners become:

. . . the embodiment of a mythic-constitutional vision of our nature, ourselves, our community, and our state.  We must protect his rights, because he has become,
in essence, a symbol; he represents a way of being in the world - lone, idiosyncratic,
and self-sufficient, defiantly bucking the ties of community and state control - that
in our wisest and longest vision of ourselves, we can and should ideally be.
        I am not making this up.  She really wrote this.  It gets even stranger -- and provides an excellent insight as to how statists view gun owners.  According to Prof. West the "social vision" of America implied by gun rights advocates is:
. . . a loose confederation of borderline, anti-social, and paranoid individuals, united only in our shared perpetual rage against the demands of community life, each and all of us bent on protecting our individual rights against the smothering embrace of social obligation.
        Borderline?  Anti-Social?  Paranoid?  United only in perpetual rage?  In the old Soviet Union one way to deal with dissidents was to brand them as mentally ill and lock them in a hospital.  (The other was to just shoot them.)  Prof. West is taking a page directly from the Marxist-Leninist play book.  Do you really think you have the right to keep and bear arms to defend yourself against those who threaten your life, liberty, or property?  You're a raging paranoid.

        During the course of her essay Prof. West refers to "American mythology".  Granted, not every story one hears about famous characters is true, but it is no myth that the War Of Independence was fought in large part by ordinary men who provided their own firearms.  It is also no myth that the people who drafted the Bill Of Rights understood all too clearly what can happen to individual freedoms when the power of government is unrestricted -- and intended to guarantee existing rights against government infringement.

        Prof. West does not believe that the individual rights version of the constitutional story is the only version that could be told.  It is in her telling that the Bill Of Rights is stood on its head.  She believes that rights stem from constitutional history "as read through the lens of our highest political ideals, and as informed by our best understanding of our human and social nature."  (This is double talk for re-writing the Constitution to mean anything you want.)

        Prof. West writes "[a]ll three sources strongly imply the existence, not of an individual right to bear arms, but, to the contrary, of a right to mutual disarmament."  (italics added)

        What her argument boils down to is that people have a right to protection against violence and that private disarmament is required to achieve this -- but more important (and I am not making this up):

We cannot forge loving connections between people, or reward
ecological and spiritual sensitivity, when we simultaneously, through
our shared constitution, valorize the gun owner and his "rights" and
disparage the victim of gun violence.  More to the point, we cannot
ourselves connect with people, live in awe and wonder, or nourish
our own spirit, when we live in fear of each other; many of us -
disproportionately poor people and women and children - live with
fear daily.
        Prof. West is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the people who live in daily fear of violence reside in communities with the most restrictive gun laws -- such as in the District of Columbia where she teaches law.  These people are largely unarmed and know all too well that the police cannot protect them.

        It might interest Prof. West to learn that, as a matter of law, local governments have no obligation to protect any particular individual.  See DeShaney v. Winnebago Department Of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189, 196-97 (1989); South v. Maryland, 59 U.S. 396 (1856).  Localities that would prohibit the private ownership of firearms have no obligation to protect the people who are disarmed.

        Prof. West might also read the cases of United States v. Panter, 688 F.2d 268, 271 (5th Cir. 1982) and United States v. Gomez, 81 F.3d 846, 850 (9th Cir. 1996).  Those two opinions from U.S. Courts of Appeal affirm that people have a fundamental right to defend themselves against criminal attack.

        If you want to nourish your own spirit, it helps if you're still breathing.