“You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that, you know, your speech is particularly important. … So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”
This rather astonishing question was posed by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The case challenges the constitutionality of a New York law that requires applicants to show “proper cause” when seeking a license to carry a concealed weapon.
This conflation of two very different constitutional rights is emblematic of the absurdity of gun rights arguments and the expansive bias of the Roberts Court.
In the controversial and damaging Citizens United case, Roberts et al. opined that corporate money in politics is “speech,” essentially distorting the First Amendment beyond recognition. Now, Roberts and the conservative majority appear poised to construe public carry of lethal weapons as an equivalent protected form of expression. A person orating from a street corner soapbox is quite a different thing than an armed man at the same intersection. Equating these two things is intellectual gymnastics of the highest order.
I have argued for years that the fierce defense of the “right to bear arms” is really about the right to “use arms.” While the ambiguous language and punctuation of the Second Amendment does not explicitly sanctify the use of weapons, the right is implicit. Why carry a gun if not intending to use it? Gun rights zealots love to call guns “tools,” a silly euphemism that belies the sole purpose of guns. Of course they may have a point, as in the observation attributed to Abraham Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
And therein is the teachable moment of the moment. In several highly watched trials this week we see what happens when we allow — encourage — the possession of “tools” and watch as these handymen scour the environment for nails to pound.
The most public trial has been that of Kyle Rittenhouse, the baby-faced teenager who took his really “cool” AR-15-style weapon with armor piercing bullets to the streets of Kenosha, Wis., lying about being an EMT and strutting through town looking for trouble. He found it and used his “tool” to shoot and kill two men and cripple a third. Cool. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted on Friday by a sympathetic jury and a judge who appeared to me to have paternal affection for Rittenhouse.
Out the window is the legal standard that rejects self-defense when you have provoked the action from which you kill to protect yourself. Sort of like carrying a rib-eye into a lion’s cage, getting scratched, killing the lion and then suing the zoo. Rittenhouse had the “right” to bear the arm, and he was itching to exercise his right to use it.
At the same time, three good old boy vigilantes, Greg McMichael, his son Travis, and William Bryan, are on trial for gunning down an unarmed Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, in the streets of Glynn County, Georgia. They, too, claim self-defense, despite having provoked the deadly encounter by chasing Arbery in their pickup trucks for at least five minutes.
They claimed to be performing a citizens arrest, suspecting Arbery of committing crimes for which they had not a scintilla of evidence. They are astonished at assertions that they profiled and chased him for being Black, despite Bryan noting that Travis McMichael stood over Arbery’s body and used an ugly racial slur.
According to a detective’s transcript, Greg McMichael said, “I don’t think the guy has actually stolen anything out of there,” referring to the construction site where Arbery had been seen looking “suspicious.” McMichael also acknowledged that he touched Arbery’s corpse to see if “he had a weapon or not.”
“Fire, aim, ready, think,” the vigilante creed.
Our epidemic of violence is spreading like a wildfire. Reprehensible Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar’s threat to kill Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Twitter bait for a madman to exercise the right to bear and use a weapon and murder her or someone else. All over America, Second Amendment aficionados carry semi-automatic weapons to schools and shopping malls. It is just a matter of time until one of these freedom fighters has his short fuse lit by a mask mandate or diversity program and mows down the entire school board.
It’s horrible and headed for worse. In the service of an arcane, illogical interpretation of the Bill of Rights, the right to carry a weapon, no questions asked, will be the law of the land. I’m not religious, but God help us.
Steve Nelson is a Valley News columnist. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.