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There’s something wrong in America: we’ve come to accept as unavoidable a staggering number of gun deaths annually.

State legislatures, either stymied by the thought of judicial review or fearful of political fallout, are doing nothing, and Republican dominated legislatures promote gun proliferation. Ohio’s General Assembly wants to do away with permits for concealed carry.

Ponder this: in the last two decades 15,000 military members and civilian contractors died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, not that much higher than the number of gun homicides here in 2020 alone. Did the framers intend that life in the United States should be more dangerous than serving in a war zone?

The Second Amendment is touted by gun advocates as sacred and without limit and cry—the extremists, anyway—that gun regulation unduly burdens “law abiding” citizens. But do those rights come at the expense of public safety?

The Constitution was created so as to “insure domestic Tranquility … promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves …”  When over 43,000 Americans die annually from gun homicides and suicide, we are not enjoying tranquility, and the general welfare and our liberty are diminished.

Here’s a very small sampling on what our attitude on guns has given us:

• Americans own 400 million firearms. The nation suffered 13,620 gun homicides in 2020, with handguns used in roughly 62 percent of gun homicides.
• In 2017, a single shooter, using 22 semi-automatic long guns, fired 1100 rounds of ammunition during a music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people, injuring more than 800.
• In 2019, a Dayton man killed nine and wounded 27 people, using a modified semi-automatic handgun.
• Last December two young children were fatally shot in a car on the southeast side of Columbus.

In debating the gun rights issue, courts have to start giving priority to public safety, and the dividing line should be simple. You want a long gun for hunting? No problem. A handgun for home defense. That’s fine. A gun for any other purpose or to carry on the street? Sorry, that’s outside the Second Amendment.

Oh, but that puts “law abiding citizens” at risk.

Not if we get serious about universal background checks for all gun transfers, long prison sentences for anyone engaging in a strawman purchase or carrying a gun on the street, banning high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic long guns, and temporarily removing guns from domestic abusers.

The U.S. Supreme Court held in the 2008 Heller decision that the “Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm … and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” The court also held, “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.”

Last November, the court heard what will likely be a pivotal case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen. The issue is whether a New York law that severely restricts the right to carry guns outside the homes violates the Second Amendment. When deciding the case, let’s hope the court meant what it said in Heller about the Second Amendment “not [being] a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

It’s easy for judges to get lost in the abstract arguments about constitutional rights. Judges decide gun cases in a vacuum of sorts, far removed from the gun violence that has become part of America. Sitting in the comfort of their secure courtrooms—the U.S. Supreme Court has its own police force—judges parse the meaning of words and phrases without having to deal with the reality of people dying from guns. And plenty of people are dying.

The defining question should be, what does a proliferation of guns mean for the public welfare?

[This post was published as an op-ed on January 5, 2022, in The Columbus Dispatch.]

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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