Democrats must defeat Republicans who serve at the will of the gun lobby.

Robert Emmett Curran
Fri, June 3, 2022

In the wake of the latest slaughter of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, Republicans have rolled out their absurd talking points about the impossibility of passing any legislation which would regulate the access to guns, including the banning of military-style weapons which are, by far, the preference of those bent on maximizing casualties in their murderous rampages.

Central to their rationale for doing nothing is the so-called constitutional foundation for unfettered gun rights. As Senator Kevin Kramer of North Dakota declaimed immediately after the carnage in Uvalde: “It is a fundamental right for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves with firearms.” All these gun rights, of course, Republican apologists find enshrined in the Second Amendment. But by any literal reading of that amendment, with its vital conditioning phrase “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” one is hard pressed to establish any individual rights to possess arms. And, indeed, until the current century, the Supreme Court had not attempted to do so. Then came Heller v. the District of Columbia in which a libertarian-oriented court, following the gun lobby, discovered an individual right which all its predecessors had failed to find. Former Chief Justice Warren Berger declared such an interpretation to be “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” ever perpetrated upon the American people.

Heller opened the floodgates for Republican-controlled legislatures to declare open season on gun restrictions. Now, with a new case challenging New York State’s banning the unconcealed wearing of weapons in public spaces, it seems inevitable that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will decide that individuals have the inherent right to openly display weapons wherever they so choose.

The Court has taken us to this terrible place before. In March of 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, in the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, spoke for the Court’s majority in ruling that Congress had no power to ban slaveowners from taking their human property into any territory of the United States. Slave owners and their advocates hailed Taney’s ruling as a constitutional guarantee of the unrestricted right to take their bonded labor wherever opportunity or necessity bade them.

Four years later, with civil war imminent, Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, pointed out that, in our form of government, the Supreme Court need not have the last word. “If the policy of the Government is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” Lincoln noted, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that . . . tribunal.” The president was reminding that Congress, the branch most beholden to the people, had the power to negate Dred Scott by their own legislation.

Once the war began, little by little, Congress began to whittle away at slave holders’ rights. In June of 1862, Congress took the decisive step of nullifying the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision itself by emancipating all slaves in the country’s ten territories.

We are now in our own civil war, divided by propaganda and disinformation. Every mass killing that gains national attention drives a paranoid minority to stockpile ever more guns, especially military-style ones. In a society ruled by politicians and judges to whom power, money, and individualism are the only things that matter, it should surprise no one that the gun culture prevails.

It need not be that way. The only way to break the gridlock that prevents Congress from taking the actions it desperately needs to take is for Democrats to defeat enough Republicans who serve at the pleasure of the gun industry. Given our current corrupt campaign financing awash with dark money, that will not be easy. But the Democrats’ great advantage is that voters overwhelmingly favor major gun reform such as universal background checks, as well as bans on assault weapons and ghost guns. For the upcoming mid-terms, Democrats need to laser focus on the Republicans’ anti-democratic and gun-crazy proclivities that have become such existential threats to our republic. More than ever, failure is not an option.

Robert Emmett Curran, Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.