For Love of Guns

Today, in Winder, Georgia, part of the metro Atlanta area, another school shooting happened. A 14-year-old child killed two students and two teachers, injuring many others, including nine who went to the hospital. Later in the day, it emerged that he and his father were interviewed by the FBI last year after the boy was linked to violent threats. The father told agents that he had hunting guns, but they were secured, and his son had no unsupervised access to them.

Everytown says Georgia has some of the weakest gun laws in the country. The resistance to passing common sense gun safety laws in this country, despite tragedy after tragedy, continues to be unfathomable.

The Supreme Court, with its insistence on protecting guns instead of people, has made it worse. Pro-gun interests, i.e., people who make money off of them, continue to pursue litigation in the lower courts in hopes of getting more and more cases to SCOTUS that will strengthen the Second Amendment at the expense of other rights.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in another of those cases just last week. Federal law makes it a crime from certain groups of people to possess firearms: people who have been convicted of a felony, fugitives, drug addicts, people with mental illness, aliens who are illegally present in the United States, people who received dishonorable discharges from the military, and more, including people convicted of domestic violence or under domestic violence restraining orders.

In last term’s Rahimi case, which we discussed here, the Supreme Court managed to keep a law on the books that makes it a crime for dangerous domestic violence offenders to possess firearms. The Fifth Circuit held that the law was unconstitutional. They ruled that the law that makes it a felony for people involved in domestic violence to possess firearms contradicted the nation’s “historical tradition” of access to firearms, even for people who aren’t “model citizens.” The three-judge panel held that the statute was unconstitutional because it gave too much power to Congress to determine who qualifies as “law-abiding, responsible citizens” when it comes to gun ownership, and this decision propelled the case to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit, a rare decision that didn’t expand Americans’ ability to possess firearms without restriction, both in their homes and in public. It found that history “confirm[s] what common sense suggests: When an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed.” That display of common sense will have only been a temporary reprieve if the new Fifth Circuit case U.S. v. Connelly, makes it to the Court.

Connelly involves a “nonviolent marijuana user.”

In United States v. Connelly, the Court held that provisions that make it a crime to provide firearms to a person who uses illegal drugs, or for that person to possess firearms, is unconstitutional, at least as applied to a marijuana user. The Court held that the law was unconstitutional as applied to the defendant. Their reasoning included the following: “The short of it is that our history and tradition may support some limits on a presently intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon … but they do not support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage.”

Gun proponents seem to have found a reasonably popular context for continuing their attack on sensible restrictions on firearms. By focusing specifically on marijuana users and the proposition that restrictions on marijuana usage and its consequences should be loosened, they hope they’ve found a way to make inroads into this entire series of prohibitions on gun possessions. Start with marijuana users and then keep going, working to erode even these minimal protections. Rahimi may have failed, but now they are rebooting, trying another avenue for attacking remaining restrictions on guns. Much as conservatives did with Roe v. Wade, patiently chipping away at abortion rights with case after case for fifty years, gun rights are on the menu. And the consequences for our communities continue to be devastating.

In the words of Vice President Harris today, “it does not have to be this way.” But it is, at least for now.

Ever since the Supreme Court decided that individual Americans, not just the “well regulated militia” the Second Amendment references, have a right to “keep and bear arms,” our vulnerability to gun violence has exploded. How many more students and teachers and families and communities will have to experience the devastation that Winder, Georgia, is dealing with tonight? We need people in our state legislatures and Congress, and leaders at every level of government, who will be more concerned with our children than with gun sellers’ profits.

We’re in this together,

Joyce