GAZETTE COLUMN: THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS - NONSENSE by John P. Flannery

NRA's Wayne LaPierre

THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS – NONSENSE

By John P. Flannery II

“The notion that registering gun purchases somehow violates the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense,” so said former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger.  He also said that “[n]othing outrages me more than the conduct of the National Rifle Association (‘NRA’).” 

Former NRA Vice President Neal Knox once said that the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were possibly “part of a conspiracy to enact gun control” and “could have been created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free world.”   This past week, the NRA has eclipsed its ordinary standard for bad taste by attacking the President’s children, asking why the federal government provides them Secret Service protection but not other children in our public schools.  Anyone want to suggest a distinction that the NRA might understand?

Our public discussion might improve, among the rest of us, exclusive of the NRA leadership, if we got some of the facts right -- like what the Second Amendment actually says and what it truly meant when it was written. 

When the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, our colonies were concerned about “standing armies” because the King had “kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.” 

When we had won our Independence and we had to concern ourselves with self-government under the Articles of Confederation, Revolutionary War Veterans led by Captain Dan Shays demanded cheap paper money, lighter taxes and the suspension of bank foreclosures of their farms.  They were going to close down the courts foreclosing on their property.  Massachusetts raised a militia to put down Shays’ rebellion and open the courts.

The Shays’ Rebellion became a part of the rationale for retired General George Washington and his aide, Alexander Hamilton, proposing a stronger federal government.  The resulting U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, clauses 15 and 16, said that the state militias going forward would respond to Congress’ call “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” and Congress would provide for “organizing, arming and disciplining the militia” reserving certain rights to the states.

The States, however, remained concerned about a “standing army.”  Colonel George Mason wished that the constitutional plan “had been prefaced with a Bill of Rights.”  He got his way and the so-called Military Amendments in the resulting Bill of Rights were the 2^nd and 3^rd Amendments, with the 3^rd Amendment prohibiting the quartering of troops and the 2^nd providing for “a well- regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  

The States were thus empowered to do exactly what they had done at Lexington and Concord.  It was a collective right, not a personal right to bear arms, and for a certain well-defined purpose, stated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 

In United States v. Cruikshank, in 1875, a plaintiff charged citizens had been deprived of their constitutional right to bear arms, and the U.S. Supreme Court found that “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution,” and that this Second Amendment right “has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government.”

In 1934, in United States v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the National Firearms Act regulating the transfer of firearms and imposing a transfer tax, concluding that the weapons at issue lacked “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”

Actually, as a result of the National Defense Act of 1916, the “militia” has since been supplanted by the National Guard, and that same Act transformed the militia from an individual state service into a division of the United States Army, rendering the Second Amendment somewhat irrelevant as originally contemplated.

There was a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, that struck down DC’s strict gun-control law but most agree that decision was less than meets the eye.  500 or more challenges to gun laws since have been defeated.      

Former Justice Justice Paul Stevens, who dissented in the Heller decision, reportedly said that, even if you “generously” construe Heller, “the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the ownership or use of the sorts of automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona in recent years.”

He also made a pointed observation about Congress: “The failure of congress to take any action to minimize the risk of similar tragedies in the future cannot be blamed on the court’s decision in Heller.”

Congress has failed to act.  The NRA may be fine with that.  But are you?

GAZETTE COLUMN: Final Destination by John P. Flannery

Jessica Ghawi

There’s a popular flick where one person’s clairvoyant vision spares several individuals from an imminent disaster only to have them die afterwards – as they had “unfairly” cheated an inescapable death, their final destination.  Jessica Ghawi had a feeling that she escaped death.

Jessica visited Toronto for vacation last month and experienced an “odd feeling,” an “almost sickening feeling,” as she described it in her blog, that wouldn’t “go away,” prompting her “to go outside” the Eaton Center into an early evening rain, rather than stay and shop at Sportcheck.

She went there for sushi, but “changed” her mind and had instead “a greasy burger and poutine.”  When she paid, her sales receipt bore the time stamp, 6:20 pm.

Only three minutes later, at 6:23 pm, Christopher Husbands, 23, stood about where Jessica had her burger, and shot several rounds, sounding “like balloons popping,” wounding Nixon Nirmalendran, at the Sushi restaurant where Jessica first thought to eat.

Jessica wrote, “I never imagined I’d experience a violent crime first hand.”

She saw the lifeless victim afterwards, the “[n]umerous gaping holes, as if his skin was putty and someone stuck their fingers in it.  Except these wounds were caused by bullets.  Bullets shot out of hatred.” 

Jessica had been spared but couldn’t shake that “odd feeling.”

Jessica returned to the United States where you can get assault rifles, large ammunition magazines and countless rounds of ammunition easier than a driver’s license.

In 1994 Congress passed a 10-year ban on assault weapons and large ammunition magazines (more than 10 rounds).  But that ban was not renewed in 2004.

After the bans lapsed, a gun man in Tucson fired more than 30 shots in 15 seconds from one large capacity magazine, hitting 19 people including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and killing 6 including a 9-year old girl, and a federal judge.

Afterwards, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Frank Lautenberg offered legislation to ban the possession or transfer of these military style magazines.  But the bill has been stalled in Committee since early 2011.

That’s how James Holmes, 24, was able to buy an assault rifle, a 100 round drum magazine, and 6,000 rounds of ammunition.  Holmes amassed these weapons while Jessica was on vacation in Toronto.

Holmes reportedly modeled himself after “the Joker” in the Batman trilogy.  Perhaps, like the Joker, Holmes want to show “how pathetic” are our “attempts to control things” and his objective was to “[u]pset the established order” so that everything becomes “chaos.”   

Holmes chose the final episode in the Superhero Batman trilogy, “Dark Knight Rises,” and it’s midnight opening on Friday, July 20, 2012 at the Century 16 Multiplex in Aurora, Colorado. 

Holmes stood in an open side doorway, wearing heavy body armor and helmet, back lit, light flooding into the theater, visible to an unsuspecting audience.

Jessica was there with her friend, Brent, when Holmes rolled a smoking hissing tear gas canister into the theater.  Then Holmes opened fire.  With his assault rifle and large magazine, his attack would last only 90 horrific seconds.

Jessica and Brent were in the middle of the theater when the smoke spread and they lay on the floor, hoping to escape harm.  Holmes shot her in the leg.  Jessica screamed.  Brent put pressure on her gaping wound.  Holmes shot Brent in the lower extremities.  Holmes shot Jessica again – this time in the head.  Jessica stopped screaming.  Holmes killed Jessica and 11 others, and injured another 58.  When Holmes’ magazine jammed, he surrendered unharmed to the police.

If we hadn’t lifted the ban on assault weapons and large ammunition magazines, Holmes might not have killed anyone or killed as many; Jessica might be alive.

Elected officials are complicit in these deaths because they have failed to contain these murderous assault rifles and these large ammunition magazines.

Some apologists suggest we need do nothing because Holmes would have found a way to commit this carnage no matter what legislative safeguard we had.  I prefer that Holmes and his kind have to manufacture unlawfully their own assault rifle and ammunition magazine.

The context of this violence is a society reeling from economic recession and war.  We openly seek truth through torture.  We’ll kill a citizen with drones without trying him.  Our young return from an uncertain war often dead or damaged.  This “war” on terror has lasted more than a decade.  That takes its toll.

We know the final destination of Jessica.  We must protect everyone else from weapons and magazines you don’t use to hunt or for target practice.  You use them only to kill – and we’ve had our fill of that.