Law Struggles To Keep Up in Arms Race
By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer
Even though some gun owners believe Barack Obama or other conspirators are on the verge of dispatching the military to disarm us all, ours really is a nation of laws. The tradition and culture underlying that reality is what makes the United States strong, not its armament. The law of the land, per the Supreme Court, is that Americans who can pass a background check have what appears from the Alito decision to be a virtually unfettered right to own firearms. Civil and military authorities can be relied upon to respect that decision.
The old arguments probably won’t stop, but the court has rendered them moot. It is now pointless to say that if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. Guns can’t be outlawed. It is immaterial to say that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. The court has ruled that guns are a constitutionally protected fixture of our society, so if people choose to kill people, guns can be part of their armory.
This leaves us with yet another technological complication the framers of the Constitution could never have anticipated. The musket that George Washington was familiar with took 10 to 30 seconds to load. It had very limited range, and its accuracy was problematic. The thug’s weapon of choice (because there wasn’t much choice) when I was a kid in Cleveland was the Saturday night special. If the thing didn’t jam or blow up in your hand, the round it fired sometimes didn’t have enough kick to break a car windshield.
Robert Reza, who killed two people and himself and wounded four at Emcore, was armed with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun capable of firing 13 powerful and accurate rounds in less time than the most skilled minuteman needed to load a musket once. With today’s technology, the most inept gunman firing into a clutch of people will almost inevitably hit someone. Statistics suggest that people aren’t any more inclined to violence than they ever were, but technology has made the few people who are so inclined far more successful at violence than ever before.
Technological realities inevitably lead to political conundrums.