Battle Over New Illinois Law Lays Bare Dangerous Gun Lobby Positions and Flawed SCOTUS rulings

There are few better examples of what is wrong with the gun lobby and its misled acolytes than the political drama playing out in reaction to the new Protect Illinois Communities Act placing limits on assault weapons and high capacity magazines in the state of Illinois.

There are several glaring -- and deadly -- flaws in the gun lobby position highlighted by the lobby's resistance to the new Illinois legislation. But first let's remember what drove the legislation to passage, the horror and senselessness of the July 4 killing of 7 and wounding of 25 by a 21 year old man wielding a semi-automatic rifle with a 30 round magazine. Who can forget the image of the newly orphaned toddler left wandering on his own after the shooting claimed his parents' lives? Thoughts and prayers offer nothing as a response to survivors-- or to the innocent dead and those who mourn them.

Perhaps the crassest aspect of the gun lobby push back comes from gun shop owners who believe their economic gain should stand in the way of ensuring public safety and a stable society.  Cigarette sellers, purveyors of fentanyl, and marketers of dangerous consumer products are having to take legal and financial responsibility for the havoc they wreak on people's health and lives. Businesses have to label dangerous products prominently and have paid billions in liability for the societal cost of their products; and finally the gun industry -- including local gun shop owners -- is facing its day of financial responsibility and reckoning.

The least the gun sellers can do is take a reality pill and publicly recognize that the firearms they sell legally do kill and wound people daily, as legal purchasers/owners morph into violent criminals and ruin the lives of thousands of innocent people every year.  It would be nice to see a shred of Christian sympathy and understanding from the gun shop owners but don't hold your breath.

Secondly, the gun lobby and SCOTUS arguments justifying the continued sale of high power assault weapons and large magazines demand strong pushback. It has become doubly clear that the skewed Supreme Court rulings in Heller (2008) and Bruen (June 2022) are the foundation of the flood of high powered weapons and high capacity magazines that are involved in the unending and increasing mass murders and random violence in this great country of ours.

The gun lobby's starting point, abetted by politically driven SCOTUS rulings:  that assault weapons are now in common circulation and that somehow the Second Amendment demands that the public continue to have open access to them. Such weapons were centuries away from the time the Bill of Rights was debated and approved by the First Congress in 1789 and ratified by state legislatures in 1791, the era of single shot pistols and the Brown Bess musket.  That the Justices voting in the majority based their rulings on the gun lobby position stands as glaring confirmation of the craven duplicity of their "originalist" arguments and their dark money Federalist Society backers. 

Thirdly, the expiration of the ban on assault style weapons in 2004 has helped put millions of AR15s on the streets and in the homes of America.  The NSSF itself reports some 20 million (euphemistically labelled “modern sporting rifles”) in circulation in 2020 and most were sold after the ban expired.  Bogus arguments about the weapons’ and high capacity magazines’ relevance to home self-defense (marketed to community fear) and hunting are just that, bogus. Sadly, feeling macho on the gun range seems to be the real reason for most AR15 sales, and blameless innocents continue to die.

The gun lobby and its deceived adherents believe that discussing assault weaponry’s technical characteristics wins the gun violence argument.  Their arguments never concede or even acknowledge the fact that such firearms, semi-automatic or rigged with bump stocks, are machines of slaughter. The deranged shooter, but legal gun owner, in Las Vegas had 23 weapons, discharged at least 1,000 rounds of his 6,000 rounds in 10 minutes, and at some points fired nine rounds a second (https://www.lvmpd.com/en-us/Pages/1OctoberFestivalShooting.aspx).  The Highland Park shooter and legal gun owner killed far fewer with his 70 plus rounds but innocents died needlessly in any case. Then there is the carnage of legal gun owners in Orlando, Uvalde, Buffalo, Sandy Hook and so, so many other places, not to mention the daily toll of random killing that occurs daily if not hourly in the U.S.

Lastly, and truly most critical and pernicious, is the degree to which the gun lobby's false Second Amendment narrative has taken deep root into portions of American society and the electorate.  This narrative is a perversion of the notion "don't tread on me" and has somehow created the mistaken belief that the Second Amendment's key principle in 1789 was to ensure that an armed (white) citizenry could rise up to overthrow a democratically elected but somehow tyrannical government chosen under the same constitution of which the Bill of Rights was a part.  

This misguided belief rejects the clear language of Section 1, Article 8 of the Constitution that authorizes Congress to call forth the militia to "enforce the laws...and suppress insurrections".  It also ignores the fact that the Second Congress followed up the previous active debate on militia and national defense in the First Congress by quickly passing the May 8, 1792 law ensuring that the militias were "well organized" as called for in the Second Amendment, enacted less than six months before. George Washington himself led that same militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania just two short years later.

Testimony to this serious challenge to clearly established legal norms is the brazen rejection of the new Illinois law by numerous county sheriffs who have embraced the gun lobby's false narrative at the betrayal of their sworn oaths to defend their state's Constitution and laws. Their idea of sanctuaries from gun safety laws is purely the result of the gun lobby’ and its bought political allies’ fifty-year effort to reshape history to their tragic and profitable objectives.

So, what to do in 2023 going forward, a year well-launched with mass killings and daily street violence?

Most fundamentally, it's long past time to tackle the U.S. gun violence cancer simultaneously on many fronts with a broad systematic and long-term approach, one conceptually unified.  "A Second Amendment for 21st Century America" could serve as the overarching theme for the urgently needed national, non-partisan discussion on how best to make America safer for all, protecting traditional gun uses and the population as a whole. This would clearly be supportive of the "21st Century Policing" approaches under active consideration by national police organizations.

Other key building blocks and actions, some immediate but others requiring years of commitment, discipline and energy, include:

First and most urgent, a concerted effort to bring the substantial majority of the population supporting common sense gun safety measures together with our law enforcement institutions, police officers and county sheriffs. We all have a life and death stake in reducing death and violence, but none more than the police of this country, whose annual fatalities and wounded increase each year and underlie the estimated 100,000 unfortunate but understandable cases of PTSD among serving officers. 

It is plain for all to see how police nervousness in confronting an increasingly armed public is causing too many cases of excessive and deadly use of force by police which, in turn, corrodes public trust in law enforcement and deepens police officers' sense of danger and fear of attack. A vicious, violent deadly circle for law enforcement – and us. And this growing sense of fear is just what the gun lobby needs — and perhaps wants — to ensure brisk sales of firearms and ammunition.

Secondly and more medium term, reestablishing reliable and accurate history is absolutely essential in turning around the deadly distortion of the Second Amendment by the gun lobby and the intellectually dishonest politicians who seek to win the votes of the deceived. It has been a successful decades-long strategy for them, one that has paid huge, commanding dividends via the demonstrably political SCOTUS rulings in Heller and Bruen. 

Most tragically, the two Court rulings have ceded the legal high ground to the gun lobby's relentless push promoting open and permitless concealed carry of firearms, endangering young and old and law enforcement throughout the country.   These rulings are now the solid rocks against which the boats of gun safety advocates will founder.

It would be helpful if the leading Associations of historians would step forward to set the historical record straight.  Indeed, the false and distorted history evident in the SCOTUS leak of the draft Alito opinion and in the Court's ruling on women's reproductive rights in the Dobbs case generated some stirrings of conscience and civic responsibility as the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians spoke out again after the Dobbs ruling was published (https://history.msu.edu/blog/2022/07/07/aha-and-oah-dobbs-vs-jackson-statement/). Gun safety and police organizations, and average citizens should make a serious joint appeal to this community of historians to challenge the manipulated history asserted in the two major SCOTUS Second Amendment rulings. And we should urge the nation’s many law schools to tackle this challenge as well in the interest of the integrity of the law and Constitution and those who commit to serve both.

It is very important that grass roots citizen organizations call out gun lobby politicians at every turn on the history, facts and cost of the Second Amendment and prevent them from wrapping themselves in the flag of a twisted Second Amendment narrative. Speak up at town meetings, in letters to the editors and via a massive call -in effort as constituents fearful of the next mass casualty event or simple random bullet in the neighborhood.  These politicians need to understand that their false narrative is undermining their communities and the country, and ultimately will endanger their re-elections.

Thirdly, both immediate and long term, we need a stepped up, strong and consistent communications effort targeted at national, state and local politicians — and the public — to underscore and to educate the country on the true -- and enormous -- economic and social cost of gun violence in all of its forms. Everytown for Gun Safely, Brady, Giffords, Johns Hopkins and others have documented these huge costs, and frequent polling confirms the national disquiet over the human cost. That police departments are making substantial liability payments for some officers’ mistakes in excessive force situations where they perceive threats where they don’t exist has not been clearly quantified, but nationally the total could possibly reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.  The drain on health and lost economic potential is clearly in the billions. And then there is the human tragedy of the mourning of many millions among the families and friends of the thousands of innocent victims, whose numbers likely approach a half a million over the past decade alone.

These concerns are the most obvious and pressing; but there is much more to do on many other levels.  The palpable positive impact that the grass roots political activism of Moms Demand, Brady, Giffords as well as a plethora of caring state and local groups have had recently in the elections is a source of encouragement and a promise for change, although these efforts could stall as well as a result of the past decisions of a gun lobby hijacked Supreme Court.

There are many other smaller steps and measures that we can take locally and at the state level to bring the spotlight on the need for shared responsibility for public safety and a safer America.  Thoughts and prayers are demonstrably not among those steps, but honest discussion apart from political partisanship and maneuvering very much is.  2023 should be the year that we tackle gun violence as a nation across the political spectrum.

I very much appreciate your attention and the fact that you stayed with this discussion through to this conclusion.  I hope that some of the observations and thoughts for next steps will gain traction with your help.

Our gun violence problem is tragically unique in the developed world, and should be a matter of national dismay if not shame.  Let’s fix this together.