A Pennsylvania gun shop owner scrutinizes the candidates' positions.
The battle over the word "bitter" between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has sparked a new look at the candidates and their stance on the Second Amendment.
In response to my inquiry about his specific position, Obama's campaign e-mailed me a one-paragraph answer: Obama believes that while the "Second Amendment creates an individual right, . . . he also believes that the Constitution permits federal, state and local government to adopt reasonable and common sense gun safety measures." Though the paragraph is titled "Obama on the D.C. Court case," that specific gun ban is never mentioned.
Obama's dance on gun rights is part of his evolution from the radical young Illinois state legislator he once was. He was recorded in a 1996 questionnaire as advocating a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns (a position he has since disavowed). He was on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which takes an aggressive gun control position, and in 2000 considered becoming its full-time president. In 2006, he voted with an 84 to 16 majority (and against Clinton) to prohibit confiscation of firearms during an emergency, but that is his only pro-gun vote in Springfield or Washington. The National Rifle Association grades his voting record (and Clinton's) an "F."
There is no anti-gun litmus test for Democrats. In 2006, Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio and Bob Casey U.S. senator from Pennsylvania with NRA grades of "A." Following their model, Obama talks about the rights of "Americans to protect their families." He has not yet stated whether that right should exist in Washington D.C.
The Democratic presidential candidates' silence is part of a pattern. For years, the national party has downplayed its historic sympathy for gun control for fear that emphasizing it would be politically costly.
When Obama first ran for the Illinois Senate 12 years ago, he answered "yes" to whether he backed banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns in the state.
He's softened that position in recent years. When she was asked why Obama didn't sign one of the Supreme Court briefs, campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms."
Clinton has a long history as an outspoken supporter of tough gun-control measures, but she, too, has moderated in recent months; last month in Wisconsin, she described how she once went hunting in Arkansas and shot a banded duck.
At a January debate, she called herself a "political realist, and I understand that the political winds are very powerful against doing enough to try to get guns off the street."
An artist's rendering of Tuesday's oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Washington D.C.'s handgun ban.
If it goes without saying that the nation is divided over gun laws, the Supreme Court certainly seemed to mirror that split during arguments today challenging the District of Columbia's stringent gun control law. Though many justices appeared to lean in favor of an individual right under the Second Amendment, they diverged over whether such a decision would still allow D.C.'s handgun ban to stay in place.
Is gun control constitutional? Should the justices affirm the individual right to own guns? Or should cities have the power to ban guns in order to fight crime?
Although the implications of striking down the D.C. gun ban are limited, a decision upholding an unqualified individual right in Heller would still be a significant victory for individual rights and constitutionalism. To shrink from enforcing a clear mandate of the Constitution -- as, sadly, the Supreme Court has often done in the past -- would create a new precedent that would be far more dangerous to liberty than any weapon in the hands of a citizen.
It is true that some liberal scholars like me, having studied the text and history closely, have concluded, against our political instincts, that the Second Amendment protects more than a collective right to own and use guns in the service of state militias and national guard units. Opponents of the District’s flat ban on handgun possession have cited my words to the court and in newspaper editorials in their support.
But nothing I have discovered or written supports an absolute right to possess the weapons of one’s choice. The lower court’s decision in this case -- the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found the District’s ban on concealable handguns in a densely populated area to be unconstitutional -- went overboard. Under any plausible standard of review, a legislature’s choice to limit the citizenry to rifles, shotguns and other weapons less likely to augment urban violence need not, and should not, be viewed as an unconstitutional abridgment of the right of the people to keep or bear arms.
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For the first time in 70 years, the U.S. Supreme Court will take on the question of whether individual Americans have the right to keep and bear arms or whether it's a "collective right" of the people for service in a state militia.
That question, which Justices will hear argued on Tuesday, is at the heart of a long, impassioned debate about how much power the government has to keep people from owning guns. The high court will likely decide by June whether Washington D.C.'s strict ban on handguns is constitutional. A lower court tossed out the ban last year.
Should law-abiding Americans have unfettered access to handguns? What limits, if any, should government place on gun ownership? Is the Second Amendment under fire?
If the D.C. ban is accepted by the court, it is hard to believe that any gun regulation will ever be struck down. If the court strikes it down, where the courts draw the line on what laws are considered "reasonable" regulations will take years to sort out.
The Department of Justice and D.C. politicians can talk all they want about how necessary handgun bans are to ensure public safety and the "reasonableness" of the restrictions. But hopefully the Supreme Court will see past that. At some point, hard facts must matter. This is one point where public safety and individual rights coincide.
Quite reluctantly, being generally a supporter of gun control, I have come to believe in the individual rights view of the provision. Though one can still make a respectable historical and textual argument for the collective rights view of the amendment, the weight of the argument is on the individualistic side. The words "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed" have to mean something. For the justices to pretend otherwise would cast doubts on our society's fidelity to the Constitution itself.
At the same time, a view of the amendment that cripples modern governments from keeping terribly dangerous weapons out of big cities and out of the hands of dangerous people would be a disaster in practical terms. Whatever conception the founders may have had of the amendment, they didn't have to think about situations like Virginia Tech, and they did not have inner-city gun crime. All of this argues against a simple translation of Second Amendment values from the founding era to our own. It's a reality that is implicitly recognized in the Bush administration's brief.
