John Ashcroft would sooner pardon terrorists than pave the way for gun
safety legislation. But without meaning to, and for all the wrong reasons,
the attorney general has just handed gun safety advocates a golden opportunity
to take away the National Rifle Association's best weapon against us.
All we have to do is agree with Ashcroft's Justice Department that the
Second Amendment gives law-abiding Americans a limited constitutional
right to own guns.
In Supreme Court briefs filed in May, the Justice Department argued for
the first time that the right to bear arms applies to ordinary citizens,
not just members of a "well-regulated militia." A 1939 court
precedent held the opposite, that the federal government could ban sawed-off
shotguns because militia members don't use them.
Gun control activists pounced on the new reading as just what we should
expect from an attorney general whose entire political philosophy can
be summed up by the old World War II song, Praise the Lord and Pass
the Ammunition. Earlier this year, Ashcroft proposed destroying records
from criminal background checks for gun purchases within 24 hours instead
of the current 90 days. Such a change would make it impossible for law
enforcement to stop fraudulent gun sales. While the NRA may not have that
desk in the Oval Office it promised in the 2000 campaign, it has at least
one chair in the Cabinet Room.
But if Ashcroft is too quick to dismiss every other constitutional right,
he's right about this one. Critics of the Justice Department's new stance
are missing its two redeeming virtues. First, after years of conservative
invective to the contrary, the Bush administration has explicitly conceded
the constitutionality of existing federal firearms laws, as well as that
of key measures currently stalled in Congress. The Justice Department
said the Second Amendment right is "subject to reasonable restrictions
designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession
of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse."
In other words, the Second Amendment leaves room for every measure the
NRA has said would destroy it -- from Brady background checks to the assault
weapons ban to closing the gun show loophole.
The second virtue of the Justice Department's interpretation is that
it gives those of us who want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals
and children a chance to prove that we really mean it when we tell people
we don't want to take their guns away. Gun safety advocates never lose
the gun debate on the merits. Most Americans and even most hunters support
background checks and other measures by overwhelming margins. The reason
we lose gun votes in Congress and gun voters at the ballot box is that
the gun lobby makes every measure, no matter how reasonable, sound like
a slippery slope to universal disarmament.
As a result, many Democrats are so afraid of scaring off rural voters
that they want to abandon the gun issue altogether. That would be a real
mistake, especially now that violent crime is going up again after a decade
of decline. Agreeing with Ashcroft is a small price to pay for the chance
to show gun country once and for all that denying guns to criminals will
not take away hunters' way of life.
We will never be certain whether the founders were more concerned about
the rights of individuals or of the militia. But after years of insisting
that gun safety measures are consistent with Americans' Second Amendment
rights, it would be hypocritical for those of us who support such measures
to argue that only militia members need apply.
We're far better off affirming that citizens have a right to own guns,
but a responsibility to obey the law and not infringe upon other citizens'
right to safety. Then we can move on to the battles most Americans want
us to win: closing the gun-show loophole, cracking down on youth gun-trafficking,
speeding up criminal background checks by bringing state records into
the Information Age, and holding the Bush administration accountable for
dramatically expanding federal gun crime enforcement.
As President Clinton's point man on guns, I never got the chance to see
Charlton Heston bring NRA convention-goers to their feet by saying that
if the government wanted to take away his gun, they'd have to pry it from
his cold, dead hands. Let Ashcroft pander and Heston keep his gun. If
we can holster the notion that the government can take your guns away,
we can get back to the business of making America a safer country -- and
the only thing cold and dead will be the NRA's case against us.
Blueprint Keyword: Extra Gun Policy
