To Bear and Keep?

While in Africa this past year, people there would ask me where I was from. In March, of course, that was an easy answer. This last trip, in December, I lengthened my answer: “I live in Tennessee, but I’m from Texas.”

The reply was often the same: “Oh, Texas? That’s where your President Bush if from, no?” I would respond, “No. Sure, he lived there, and he was even governor there, but he’s not from Texas.”

Texas is, of course, special—and special to me. And thus, with my opinion of W. slipping markedly since he moved to DC, I did want to be clear that he is not an actual Texan. (Yes, I voted for him as governor in 1998, but that’s where he should have stayed. (Was my vote because I actually supported him? No. It was because I didn’t think about it on my own but just went with what I thought I thought. Had I really investigated things, I have no idea who I would have supported; I don’t remember much of anything about Mauro at this time.)

Texas is also unique. This last trip of mine involved my spending a week with attorneys from East African countries (and Nigeria), and they had many questions about the United States. These questions were posed to me and my colleague who grew up on the east coast and for the last fifteen years or so has lived on the west coast—never in the south, never in the middle of the country, and never, naturally, in Texas. It was interesting to see the differences in our answers based on the perspectives with which we grew up and lived.

I had talked to my colleague about politics, and she knew that I grew up thinking I was conservative but had finally figured out who I actually was only in the last decade. She also knew my views about religion and tolerance; we shared those views. (Mine is, essentially, who am I to tell you that your faith is wrong? Leave me and my spirituality alone and I’ll do the same for you.)

So back to those questions in December . . . it was interesting when someone asked about guns. For one, in Uganda, many security personnel walk around openly with large guns—automatic types. That scares me something fierce. (I will never forget the first time I saw the police who were checking cars, when I was leaving the Nairobi airport in March, just walking around with what appeared to be an AK47-type weapon casually slung over a shoulder, or even worse, held in the hand with a finger in the trigger area.) And the local attorneys there discussed a tribe in the northern part of the country, all heavily armed, who did not seem to hesitate to shoot at people.

When, then, the question was asked about guns in the US, and my colleague gave a pretty typical response when you think of a liberal response, she was shocked when I said I’d had a license to carry a concealed handgun and would almost certainly renew that license soon (it is available in TN). Imagine also, then, her possibly double-shock at learning such an item had been give to me—as a gift—many years ago. As you might realize, this made for very lively discussions with our African colleagues.

I explained my decision to continue to be an owner—and to eventually again pursue my concealed-carry permit. But I also explained my distaste of firearms in general: the horrific ability they provide to allow multiple fatal results in an unbelievably short amount of time.

I didn’t use to think this way. Working on criminal cases, though, can change how one thinks. So many of the cases I read about and worked on in my three years with the State involved the use of guns. Too often, they were used by someone angry, enraged by passion, and/or intoxicated (or otherwise altered).

This is the problem: a firearm can do so much damage to a human body in such a short amount of time; it can do that amount of damage to multiple bodies in a short amount of time. And it can all be done from a considerable distance. For the person wielding the weapon, this often seems to occur without the foresight needed—because it’s so damned easy to just “do.”

Many of us know someone who could, in a fit of anger, grab a weapon and do something disastrous. That’s where it gets frightening. And that’s where I have my problem with the loose ownership laws we have.

This brings us to the happening yesterday in Missouri: five dead and two wounded when a man entered a city council meeting and opened fire. From what I’ve read, I understand he’d been arrested in the past for disorderly conduct—at city council meetings. He had ongoing problems with the government. Even his brother told a CNN affiliate, “The only way that I can put it in a context that you might understand is that my brother went to war tonight with the people that were of the government that was putting torment and strife into his life. . . . And he had spoke on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied him all access to the rights of protection, and therefore he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue.”

He went to “war with the . . . government.” Is this the “militia” our Second Amendment means to arm? Is this the purpose of freedom of gun ownership? I don’t think so. But how do we address this while preserving the Second Amendment?

(I have friends who were at Appalachian Law School when the student there shot and killed several people. We all remember Va Tech not too long ago. Columbine. Paducah, KY. Tragedies that happened so fast, so easily. Too easily.)

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case addressing the Second Amendment next month (District of Columbia v. Heller). The opinion, of course, will surely not be issued until June. The case will review DC's ban on handgun with the following issue:

Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code §§ 7.2502.02(a)(4) [banning handguns], 22-4504(a) [banning gun carrying, including at home], and 7.2507.02 [requiring all guns to be both unloaded and locked or disassembled] — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?

The underlying questions, then, have been explained as follows:
(1) Are individuals’ rights protected under the Second Amendment?
(2) If so, is that right in existence regardless of affiliation with a “well-regulated” militia? (and what is “well-regulated”? Is that regulated by the State?)
(3) If so, what does the Constitution protect as far as the purposes exist to “bear and keep” a firearm?

The big question, conceivably, is the last one: what purposes are protected? And if you have the purpose of home and self defense protected, can the state prohibit your keeping one that is loaded or require it to be disassembled? Ah, but this applies only to handguns; you could still keep a shotgun.

Hard questions.

Allowing anyone (essentially) to have access, though, makes it easier for things like what happened in Missouri yesterday to happen again. And as I write this, a new report has come in: a female student shot two others then herself in a classroom at Louisiana Tech. Three dead. In seconds. Without a gun, that would be very unlikely to have happened.

Am I giving mine up any time soon? Of course not. As long as it’s so easy for criminals to own, I want to as well. But is that what the purpose is for my right to "keep"? Is that the "defense"? I don't know. And I don't know if we'll know come June. Frankly, though, I wish no one owned.