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"As Schiff and others point out, "Second Amendment rights" is a problematic term because it implies that Americans possess an absolute constitutional right to own and use firearms. This has been the position of the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights organizations for years.
However, even though people may believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own guns, federal courts have almost unanimously held that the amendment does not ensure any such individual right. Instead, the courts have consistently reaffirmed an interpretation that the amendment's purpose was to protect the power of states to create militias armed with privately owned guns.
It's only been in the last 10 to 15 years that an effort to interpret the amendment differently -- as a guarantor of an absolute individual right to guns -- has gathered significant momentum, fueled in large part by the gun lobby. The NRA, for instance, has given $1 million to the George Mason University School of Law to create and endow a faculty position called the Patrick Henry Professorship of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment. In addition, the National Rifle Association has recently launched a radio program espousing pro-gun commentary including their interpretation of the Second Amendment."
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Home > Gun Violence > News > Features & Commentary
Features & Commentary
Democrats Turn to 'Second Amendment Rights' for Political Gain
8/4/2004
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Feature Commentary
by Dick Dahl
While it remains to be seen whether a termination of the 1994 assault-weapons ban in September might yet infuse gun control into the 2004 election season, Democrats have moved so far away from the issue that they almost sound like Republicans.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) spoke on the need for the ban's extension during the Democratic National Convention, but her call for Congressional action on gun control has become a rarity within a party that once championed the issue. While the Democratic party platform does call for reauthorization of the ban, it also states that the party "will protect Americans' Second Amendment right to own firearms." And Democrat after Democrat, including Presidential nominee John Kerry, has used language about "Second Amendment rights" during their campaigns this season.
Robert J. Spitzer, a political-science professor at the State University of New York at Cortland and author of the book, "The Politics of Gun Control," has noticed the trend and attributes it to lingering perceptions of the 2000 election season. "Some Democrats felt that they were hurt by the gun issue then," Spitzer says. "I was never convinced of that, but some Democrats felt they were being seen as too strongly in favor of gun control and therefore it would make sense for them to emphasize sportsmen's rights and Second Amendment rights."
Sue Ann L. Schiff, executive director of the San Francisco-based Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV), believes that the increasing Second Amendment references by Democrats also reflect something broader: seepage of language that has been used by the gun lobby for many years into more general discourse.
As Schiff and others point out, "Second Amendment rights" is a problematic term because it implies that Americans possess an absolute constitutional right to own and use firearms. This has been the position of the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights organizations for years.
However, even though people may believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own guns, federal courts have almost unanimously held that the amendment does not ensure any such individual right. Instead, the courts have consistently reaffirmed an interpretation that the amendment's purpose was to protect the power of states to create militias armed with privately owned guns.
It's only been in the last 10 to 15 years that an effort to interpret the amendment differently -- as a guarantor of an absolute individual right to guns -- has gathered significant momentum, fueled in large part by the gun lobby. The NRA, for instance, has given $1 million to the George Mason University School of Law to create and endow a faculty position called the Patrick Henry Professorship of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment. In addition, the National Rifle Association has recently launched a radio program espousing pro-gun commentary including their interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Joining this movement has been a centrist group, Americans for Gun Safety. Created in 2000, AGS set out to occupy a middle ground in the highly polarized war zone between gun-rights organizations and gun-violence-prevention groups. AGS immediately adopted a position that gun owners are, in fact, protected by the Constitution, although it differed from the gun-rights groups in saying that the Second Amendment doesn't stand in the way of sensible gun laws.
So when the Democratic Party platform was officially adopted at the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, AGS saluted the action as a historic event signifying the willingness of the party to compromise on the gun issue.
While the Democratic Party platform doesn't describe the Second Amendment as an impediment to reasonable gun laws, the way that many Democratic politicians have adopted its language of "Second Amendment rights" might prove costly, some observers believe. "At least for now, the courts have said that the Second Amendment is not an obstacle to gun legislation," says Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. "But to the extent that politicians are using the language of 'gun rights,' that may make it more difficult to enact sensible gun legislation in the future."
Spitzer, on the other hand, believes that espousing a centrist position on guns might hold limited political benefit for some Democratic candidates. He thinks that Kerry's use of "Second Amendment rights" language might help him in some of the rural swing states "because he's trying to send signals that he's not hostile to responsible gun use," and because it provides little political risk.
But even if there are short-term benefits for Democrats espousing Second Amendment gun rights, what might be the longer-term legislative effects of the centrist approach to gun policies? The NRA, which scoffs at AGS, is notoriously uncompromising. And many gun-violence-prevention activists believe that the best way to deal with the NRA is to be equally uncompromising. In 2001, competing bills that set out to close the "gun-show loophole" were introduced in Congress, with AGS supporting a bill by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). The McCain-Lieberman bill came under heavy fire from gun-violence-prevention activists as a weak piece of legislation. John Johnson, executive director of Iowans for the Prevention of Gun Violence, told Join Together Online at the time, "I think that rather than weaken our proposals to get them through Congress, we need to strengthen the Congress." Joe Sudbay, former legislative director at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said at the time, "If we're going to be in a debate with the NRA and they're not compromising, we're just compromising with ourselves. It's inconsistent with every other progressive issue that exists. And it's detrimental to gun control." In the end, Congress failed to act on any bill to close the loophole.
Now, in voicing its support of a constitutional right to own guns, the Democratic Party is seeking more compromise. They're seeking the political expediency of avoiding the whole story about Constitutional gun rights. "The Democrats just don't feel they can win by telling the truth" about the federal courts' interpretation of the Second Amendment, says Mark Karlin, chairman of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. "So they just say, 'I support Second Amendment rights.'"
In 2000, a group of 50 prominent academics signed an open letter to Charlton Heston, then president of the NRA, to correct his misstatements about the Second Amendment. "The National Rifle Association's repeated suggestions that the Second Amendment somehow stands in the way of effective and reasonable regulation of guns and gun ownership is a distortion of legal precedent and a disservice to all Americans," they wrote. As former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger said in 1991, the idea that the Constitution protects private gun owners is simply erroneous. He chastised the NRA for pushing that interpretation, saying, "(The Second Amendment) has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
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