Gun Safety Has Moral High Ground, Gun Lobby Has Political Advantage Based on a Manipulated Narrative, It’s Time to Challenge It Head On

As Marvin Gaye once sang, “What’s going on?

What’s going on is that there is a wave of dangerous red state moves to widen permitless carry – Alabama and Ohio being the latest — that represents a clear and present danger to U.S. public safety and to millions of defenseless people across the country.  Similar red state efforts to broaden open carry only heighten the risks and threat to us all.

Unfortunately, and dangerously, the catch phrase of “constitutional carry” has gained an ominous foothold and increasing influence as a result of relentless gun lobby public relations and misinformation. 

For its part, the U.S. Supreme Court could add its weight to this fractious movement should it rule against New York state concealed carry licensing requirements in the case of NYRPA v Bruen in June.  If that happens, all bets are off as the public arming of America gathers pace.

There is one step that we need to take, and to take it now and urgently since having the moral high ground is clearly not enough.

Taking the step is not meant to divert efforts and resources from the valuable work ongoing by so many organizations and individuals who are working hard every day to curb and reduce gun violence across the country.  We simply need to do more and specifically to do more to get the Supreme Court’s attention about the Second Amendment’s true cost to U.S. society and the nation.

What to do? 

Challenge directly -- and with great energy -- the gun lobby’s false and manipulated narrative drawing on the Second Amendment’s disjointed text to justify their aggressive push for “constitutional carry”.  It is unfathomable why they want to put so many powerful firearms in the hands of so many untested and untrained individuals, including the unstable and therefore the dangerous.

There is also the need to challenge those who are politically motivated to flash weapons in public as part of their open campaign to intimidate and to try to make it seem such behavior is normal and acceptable.   Moreover, the gun lobby’s irresponsible efforts clearly underlay the creation of individual and unofficial militia formations which have no basis under current law (and the Constitution), and which augur for future political violence and instability.

This past weekend’s various shooting incidents simply reconfirm the upward trajectory of gun violence across the country.  Random shootings wreaking havoc in crowds, individuals killing friends and strangers, and so on, you’ve read similar news before.  And it is, no doubt, happening as these words are being written.

Perhaps most amazing is how the gun lobby has persuaded so many people to ignore or, perhaps better said, to accept the incredible level of gun violence that the U.S. experiences every day.  The comparative statistics irrefutably confirm that the U.S. records thirty times the level of homicide that either the U.K, or Japan do, with firearms the indisputable reason. 

Rather, the gun lobby seeks to distract from this reality by trying to get people to slice and dice statistics in order shift attention to the marginal variations of gun violence, to make them seem normal or relevant, and to justify their legislative initiatives.  In great contrast, in other industrialized democracies where citizens enjoy rights as extensive and free as those in the U.S., such a level of violence is deemed horrifying and a stain on their nations.

What is perhaps most telling is that, rather than apologies from the responsible red state legislators and governors, we hear ideological defenses of their actions to make guns available to any and all with the wherewithal to buy.  Plaintive pleas from their own law enforcement leaders are just that, plaintive, with no effect on the actions of such self-serving ideological and, yes, callous politicians.

The only way to turn back the tide of “constitutional carry” is to make it clear that its premise – an explicit mandate justified by the Second Amendment – is mistaken, misplaced, misguided, and simply false history. 

Most basically, and as many people recognize, the Amendment’s text is fundamentally flawed, and its opening (prefatory) clause is incoherent in this, the 21st century.  

First of all, well organized militias are demonstrably not necessary to the security of a free State today.  State militias were subsumed into the National Guard in 1903, with weapons supplied by the Guard and not by individual National Guard members. Our armed forces and law enforcement agencies are the foundation of U.S. security. 

But, to those who see a citizen’s militia supplementing the U.S. uniformed military services and national, state, and local law enforcement to defend the country from a land invasion from Mexico or Canada, I can only offer skepticism and perplexity. Modern day attacks on the U.S. from other quarters, the real and ever present threat to this free State, will come via nuclear, biological, chemical, and cyber weapons, all launched from a distant abroad.  

In reality, the rise of domestic militias themselves represent a threat to the security of our free State, and law enforcement agencies at all levels view the threat as such. 

The gun violence of a century ago from the mob and gangster wars of the 1920s and 1930s brought the country to a national consensus that the proper response was common sense gun regulation; and many laws were enacted as a result.   There was general popular understanding of the Second Amendment and the limits to “shall not be infringed”.

The re-writing of these simple truths grounded in well-documented history began when “out of my cold, dead hands” ideologues took over the gun lobby in the late 1970s.  The recent red state legislature actions are the logical result of 50 years of incessant warped gun rights propaganda that has largely gone unanswered over these many decades.

It is now time to stand up and push back, with facts about history, facts about human suffering, facts about economic costs, and facts about a society being rent apart against a steady and growing backdrop of violence and innocent victims.

Read the history and challenge the gun lobby’s false narrative at every turn.  Speak up at political candidates’ town meetings, write articles for the newspapers and post the truth on social media.  Make the gun lobby own the 20,000 murders and the 24,000 suicides by firearms that occur each year.  Make the gun lobby justify how a non-existent well organized militia is still necessary to the security of a free state in 2022.  Make the gun lobby confront and take responsibility for the mourning and human suffering of the victims’ surviving families and friends, who number in the millions across our land.

We have two months to have an impact on the Supreme Court deliberations on NYRPA v Bruen. The time to speak out publicly was yesterday and is today and every tomorrow.

Please join this important effort that is so crucial to the stability of the country and our society over the coming years and decades.

Let’s all agree: we need a Second Amendment, but one that meets the country’s 21st century needs.

With appreciation.