A bipartisan group of senators on June 12 announced they had reached a deal on a narrow set of gun safety measures with sufficient support to move through the evenly divided chamber. The deal fell far short of a renewal of an assault weapons ban, or even raising the age from 18 to 21 before an individual can purchase an assault weapon, but it would be a step forward.
The agreement reached by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Biden, includes enhanced background checks for people under 21 who want to buy assault weapons, to give authorities time to check the juvenile and mental health records, and a provision that would, for the first time, extend to dating partners a prohibition on domestic abusers having guns.
It would also provide funding for states to enact so-called “red-flag” laws that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous, as well as money for mental health resources and to bolster safety and mental health services at schools.
The reforms, if they had been in place a month ago, would not have stopped the 18-year-old Uvalde killer, who apparently did not have a juvenile record, from getting the AR-15 he used to massacre school children and their teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It’s also possible that Republicans will try to ditch the enhanced background checks for people under 21 and the “boyfriend loophole” to prevent gun sales to people convicted of domestic violence offenses when it comes to writing the bill..
“The details will be critical for Republicans, particularly the firearms-related provisions,” a Senate aide told the Washington Post. “One or more of these principles could be dropped if text is not agreed to.” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also made that pretty clear—he praised the negotiators but pointedly withheld an endorsement.
John Cornyn (R-Texas), who led the talks for the Republicans and has an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, said he was interested in forging a compromise, but only if it preserves gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment.
“This is not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens,” he said. “It’s about ensuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.”
Preserving gun owners’ rights is an article of faith for the NRA, the foremost spokesman for the gun lobby, but it’s a relatively new feature of constitutional law. “A fraud on the American public” is how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun.
When Burger spoke those words in 1991, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and author of “The Second Amendment, a Biography,” noted in 2014,.
The Second Amendment was proposed in 1789 out of fear that the new government would establish a “standing army” of professional soldiers and would disarm the 13 state militias, made up of part-time citizen-soldiers and revered as bulwarks against tyranny. Every white man age 16 to 60 was required to own a musket or other weapon for military use.
James Madison—an ardent Federalist who pushed for changes to the newly ratified Constitution—proposed 17 amendments on topics ranging from the size of congressional districts to legislative pay to the right to religious freedom. The Second Amendment addressed the “well regulated militia” and the right “to keep and bear arms.” The use of the phrase “bear arms” in those days referred to military activities, Waldman noted. There is no reference to an individual’s right to own a gun for self-defense or recreation in Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor was it mentioned, with a few scattered exceptions, in the records of the ratification debates in the states.
The NRA was founded after the Civil War by Union officers who wanted a way to sponsor shooting training and competitions. The group supported the first federal gun control law in 1934, which cracked down on the private use of machine guns used by bank robbers. The organization supported firearms safety education, marksmanship training and shooting for recreation.
Then, in 1977, activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms showed up at the NRA’s annual convention and pushed their way into power. “The NRA’s new leadership was dramatic, dogmatic and overtly ideological. For the first time, the organization formally embraced the idea that the sacred Second Amendment was at the heart of its concerns,” Waldman wrote.
During President Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress enacted a ban on assault weapons and magazines that could carry 10 or more rounds. It was included in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, an election-year package meant to show that Democrats were “tough on crime,” when then-Sen. Joe Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The bill’s sponsors put a 10-year “sunset provision” on the assault weapons ban, but it still only got 52 votes in the Senate. In the House, 77 Democrats – predominantly from rural, blue-collar and Southern districts – opposed the assault weapons ban, which narrowly passed the House 216 to 214. The House passed the overall measure on a 235-to-194 vote, with 46 Republicans joining the majority and 64 Democrats opposed.
But the ban on assault weapons provoked a backlash in rural areas, particularly in the South and West. In the following midterm election, Republicans gained 54 House seats, including 19 in the South, giving them more seats in the South than Democrats for the first time since Reconstruction, as Rs took control of the House for the first time in 42 years with a 230-204 majority and put Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s Office in 1995.
Many of those rural districts have been Republican ever since, as Democrats have come to rely on urban and suburban voters.
Democrats in 1994 also lost eight seats in the Senate, to make Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas) majority leader with 52 votes.
The US Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law that had effectively banned handguns in the home.
The House on June 9 passed a bill that would raise the legal age to buy certain semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 years old, establish new federal offenses for gun trafficking and for selling large-capacity magazines, and allow local governments to buy back magazines. There is speculation that the current court, with its three Trump justices, would reject an assault weapons ban. That doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t try it. But it might explain why many Democrats in swing states aren’t itching to push it. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022
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