We Don't Have To Respect Dumb

The Founding Fathers didn't intend this!

We are not supposed to have heavy hearts on the 4th of July, but of course we do tonight.

It wasn’t too soon for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Illinois to say it was time to move on just two hours after the shooting in Highland Park that left six people dead and 24 seriously injured. (He later said that wasn’t what he meant).

The best we were able to do after Uvalde and Buffalo and countless mass shootings this year was to get a measure with limited (but thankfully significant) steps towards sensible gun laws through Congress. And still, Americans are vulnerable in places where they should feel safe.

The truth is this: the Founding Fathers would not have wanted the country to live like this. Their muskets weren’t so sacred to them that they would have sacrificed our children to them. They didn’t pass the Second Amendment so parents could get shot in our streets on the 4th of July. The Second Amendment’s well-regulated militia wasn’t supposed to be shooting at us!

Whatever the Second Amendment means, arming militias—as the text says, or the improbable individual right the Supreme Court decided to protect in the Heller case, it does not add up to what we saw today. We shouldn’t have any doubts about what the Founding Fathers would say if they were here to see people dying at parades, school children and teachers in their classrooms, and an endless toll of people in supermarkets, churches, temples, mosques, shopping malls, movie theaters and all of the places Americans gather to enjoy the inalienable rights the Founders worked so hard to secure for us. That’s obviously not what they intended. They put too much of themselves into creating this country for us to have any doubt on that point.

Tonight, again, we are sad and we are angry and we seem broken. But the story of this country has always been to expand its promises: to write Black people into the Constitution, to include women among the citizens who can vote, to protect the LGBTQ community. That work has always been hard and we live in a moment where all too often it feels like progress hasn’t just stopped, but we’ve gone retrograde. [A little extra reading here, Georgetown Law Professor Heidi Li Feldman has this thread on why it’s so important to protect the ability to gather in the public square]

The challenge we face is nothing less than securing our rights — not just our personal rights, but the rights of everyone who needs the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to make their world secure — in a time where increasingly, a runaway party is hell-bent on the establishment of one religion, the curtailment of free speech and laws that leave guns better protected than women. It’s a time when white supremacists march openly on our streets with far more support than I remember them ever enjoying in my lifetime.

The “Patriot Front,” a white supremacist propaganda group, marches in Boston earlier this week.

We don’t need to have all the answers today. Tonight, it’s enough to know with certainty that we are going to pick ourselves back up tomorrow and keep fighting, because it’s too important to give up. We’re going to find the right candidates, the right commitments and work to make them come alive at the midterm elections and elections beyond. We’ll play a long game, while advocating for changes that can happen now.

But the next time someone has the audacity to tell you, “this is what the Founders meant, what they wanted,” you don’t have to respond with a finely tuned legal argument, one grounded in the Federalist Papers and other writings of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, Jay and the rest. You don’t have to treat crazy with respect.

Just tell them to stop for a minute and think about what they’re saying. The Founders wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of fighting a revolution and creating a new nation only to have their words twisted so that AR-15s matter more than our children; where dead Americans lie in the nation’s streets on the 4th of July. Some arguments don’t deserve a thoughtful, measured response. They should be laughed out of the public square and rejected unequivocally as Anti-American. So let’s get on with that.

Sending you lots of love tonight. We’re all in this together,

Joyce