Don’t Ban Guns. Just Ban The Ammunition.
Ever since
my late friend Tony Scalia decided that the 2nd Amendment protected
the personal ownership of guns, Gun-nut Nation has been falling over themselves
reminding everyone that any attempt to regulate gun ownership is an infringement
of their 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Now the fact that a Constitutional
Amendment isn’t a ‘right’ of any kind, so what?
It still sounds good.
Meanwhile,
the Scalia opinion does create some problems for Gun-control Nation because the
last thing that any liberal wants to be accused of, is being against the
Constitution. After all, wasn’t it a
very liberal Constitutional scholar, Sandy Levinson, who reminded
us liberals that if we want to use the Constitution to protect free speech, we
also have to use it to protect private ownership of guns?
But it
occurs to me that in all this talk about what the 2nd Amendment
means or doesn’t mean, there’s one thing for sure that it doesn’t cover.
Nowhere in the Constitution can we find the slightest mention of ammunition,
and since it’s the ammunition which is what really causes all those gun
injuries every year, who cares about whether or not everyone can walk around
with a gun? Just ban the ammunition for
those guns; there’s absolutely no Constitutional protection for ammunition at
all.
Hey, wait
a minute! How can you have a gun without ammo?
How can you use a gun without ammo?
I play around and shoot unloaded guns all the time. Last night I was
watching one of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, and every time
that Kevin Pollak (Hockney) or Stephen Baldwin (McManus) stuck his gun in
someone’s face, I raised my Sig 226 and shot the guy dead. I have probably pulled the trigger of my Sig
or my Colt Python thousands of times sitting on my couch and nobody’s ever
gotten hurt. You show me a gun-nut who doesn’t dry fire his guns all the time
and I’ll show you a gun-nut whose wife made him sell all the guns.
If you
take the trouble to read Scalia’s Heller opinion, you’ll
note that he makes a distinction between guns that have always been found in
the home, as opposed to ‘unusual’ weapons; i.e., weapons of war. The former are
protected by the 2nd Amendment, the latter not. So, in making a
somewhat arbitrary definition of civilian versus military arms, his opinion
rests on what he and other conservative judges call the ‘originalist’ interpretation
of legal texts. But when it comes to the ammunition used by these so-called personally-owned
guns, the argument falls flat on its face.
The most
popular ammunition caliber currently sold to civilians who own all those
self-defense guns is the 9mm caliber, sometimes called 9×19, sometimes called
9mm Luger, but whatever it’s called, it was designed specifically for military
use. The inventor of this caliber was Georg Luger, who also happened to be the
inventor of the Luger pistol, a.k.a., the P-08. The gun and the ammunition were
standard issue to the German Army from 1900 until 1943.
Want the
second most popular ammunition caliber? It is probably the 45acp round that was
developed by John Browning for his Colt 1911 pistol, the military sidearm for the
U.S. Army until 1976. Both the 9mm and
45acp calibers were developed for one reason and one reason only – to give soldiers
and other armed forces a highly-lethal round that could be carried in a
handgun. Now if anyone out there wants
to claim that ammunition developed for the sole purpose of killing human beings
is a ‘sporting’ round, go right ahead.
It seems
to me that if my friends in Gun-control Nation really want to get serious about
reducing gun violence, they might consider coming up with a plan that will
strictly regulate the ownership of ammunition because those products don’t have
any Constitutional protection at all.
Of course,
I can just see my Gun-nut Nation friends starting to yell and scream about ‘threats’
to their ammunition ‘rights.’ Good. Let ‘em yell and scream.
