... From my cold dead hand
Guest Opinion
By Donald Kaul
I had given the speech and was taking questions from the audience - always easier than giving a speech.
A man asked me if I had any ideas about how to achieve a rational system of gun control in this country.
My answer surprised me.
"No," I told him. "I've given up on gun control. That battle is over. We've lost. I no longer think it's an achievable goal and if I were a politician I wouldn't lose an election over it."
The audience, a liberal group, was properly aghast. That answer was so unlike me.
I've been writing a newspaper column for nigh on 45 years now and in that time I have written something on the order of 75 columns calling for more stringent gun control.
Every time some misbegotten teenager dragged a duffel bag full of automatic weapons to school to punish classmates for laughing at him, every time a postal worker has gone postal, every time an innocent child has taken a stray bullet in the head, I have been there. With a column.
A fat lot of good it has done me or anyone else.
And so I have written my last gun control column. As Roberto Duran might say: "No mas."
I'm not even going to comment on last month's Supreme Court decision striking down the Washington, D.C., ban on handguns.
And a curious decision it was. By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled the Second Amendment to the Constitution conferred upon Americans a right to own a gun "for private use" that cities and states couldn't take away.
But in the next breath, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said:
"Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
To which I can only say: "Huh?" Make up your mind, Tony. Do we have the right to bear arms or not?
Perhaps a curious decision is all we should expect on this issue; the Second Amendment is pretty curious itself, after all. It says:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
You might think (as gun-control advocates have argued) the amendment limits the right of gun ownership to the context of militia membership. But when it comes on with that "shall not be infringed," it sounds about as absolute as it gets.
It's confusing. The real significance of the decision is it breaks the chain between gun ownership and militia membership. Scalia waved his wand and the militia went away.
Less than a week after the court handed down its opinion, a grand jury in Texas refused to indict a white man who had killed two black men who had just burglarized his neighbor's house.
The shooter had called 911 and told the operator, "I'm not going to let them get away with it. I'm going to shoot. I'm going to kill them."
The operator told him not to shoot, police were on the way. Just as the cops arrived, the guy killed the fleeing burglars.
"He was put in a place where he didn't have any other choice," his lawyer said.
Whatever. The decision - surprise-surprise - seems to be going over well in Texas.
Meanwhile, in Georgia they have passed a law that lets people with gun permits carry their shooting irons into restaurants, state parks and onto public transportation.
The head of the Atlanta airport, the nation's busiest, has said he won't honor the law in his airport. Guns will be banned from the premises. He's being sued by gun-rights advocates of course.
Second Amendment, schmecond amendment. This country is nuts on the subject of guns.
Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.
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