History Gives Us Lots of Middle Ground on Guns

My prophecy: at no point in the foreseeable future will the government of the United States or any state therein 1) ban guns or start confiscating the firearms of law-abiding citizens; or 2) allow people to own personal nuclear devices. If you will join me in discounting the end points of these two popular slippery-slope arguments, then we can start talking about what happens in the middle.
       As it turns out, the middle is where most Americans live—on gun control and on just about everything else. Recent polling data suggests that a bare majority (52%) of the American population supports the generically worded “stricter gun control regulations.” Specific measures, however, do better.

·      56% of Americans support a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

·      67% support a law that prevents people with mental illness from purchasing guns.

·      92% support universal background checks for all gun buyers

       The NRA, of course, opposes all of these measures, which should not come as a surprise to anybody. Many people who are not shills for the gun industry, however, oppose them too, often on historical grounds or on the assumption that these sorts of thing are not compatible with the Second Amendment, which, they assume, prohibits gun regulation absolutely.
       But both history and the Second Amendment are a bit more complicated than that—something that the Supreme Court recognized in their recent District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago decisions. And both of the authors of those decisions—Justices Scalia and Alito—made it very clear that they based their idea of acceptable regulations on the fact that the Founding generation accepted, and encouraged, quite a few regulations on guns at the time that the Second Amendment was created.

       In 1789, for example, local government officials kept lists of what guns people owned, so that their service in the local militias could be tracked. They required people to be trained to operate and store weapons safely, they permitted “background checks” to prevent gun ownership by classes of people deemed dangerous to the state (that included Native Americans, anybody with African blood, people who refused service in the militia, and, in several states, Catholics and Jews.) And, as Justice Scalia remarked in a 2012 interview, eighteenth-century common law provided for the punishment of people who “carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head axe or something.”

       What does this all mean? Quite a bit, actually. Gun  ownership did not just become controversial in the 21^st century. There have been such controversies throughout American history—including the generation that debated and passed the Second Amendment. This history does not solve our problems, of course, but it gives us plenty of middle ground to stand on as we search for our own solutions.

       I did not talk much about these controversies in my book That’s Not What They Meant! I now realize that this was probably a mistake. To make up for it, I have written a new “chapter” of the book, which is available as an Amazon single for .99 cents. Happy Reading.