The Good State by A. C. Grayling

Author:A. C. Grayling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786077196
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

The constitutions of the United States of America and the United Kingdom stand at opposite ends of a polarity, the one fixed almost to the point of fossilization, the other uncodified, opaque, and labile to the point of vacuity. Examples that prove these points are respectively American gun laws and British referendums.

The US Constitution, adopted in 1789 and amended twenty-seven times, has the character of holy writ, sometimes defensibly so – as with the First Amendment rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and entrenchment of secularism – and sometimes indefensibly so – as with the Second Amendment right to ‘bear arms’, an outstanding example of how a constitutional provision can subvert its raison d’être and do harm. In the case of the Second Amendment the harm consists in gun-caused fatalities amounting, at time of writing, to 40,000 per annum – 110 a day, nearly five an hour, about one every twelve minutes.

The text of the Second Amendment reads, ‘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.’ The great debate over whether this was a right of individuals or a right for ‘the people’ to maintain a perpetually armed militia was settled in 2008 by a Supreme Court judgment in favour of the ‘individual right’ reading, reversing a 1939 Supreme Court decision that went the other ‘collective right’ way.4

The constitutional point that needs to be made about the Second Amendment concerns not just the intentions of its drafters, but more materially the fact that when it was adopted the ‘arms’ in question were muzzle-loading muskets. Today the arms bought by people who commit mass murders at schools and colleges include automatic assault weapons such as the AR-15 rifle. This weapon, which comes in a number of varieties, can be legally purchased at the age of eighteen in states where it is illegal to purchase any alcoholic drink, including beer, under the age of twenty-one. Enthusiastically described by the National Rifle Association (NRA) as ‘America’s rifle’, it was used in the following recent massacres: the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 (in which 20 children aged six and seven years were killed), the San Bernardino shooting in 2015 (14 killed, 22 seriously injured), the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 (58 killed, 422 wounded), the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017 (26 killed, 22 injured), and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 (17 students and teachers killed, 17 injured). This is not an exhaustive list. The Columbine High School killing of ten students in 1999 prompted Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine (2002), which challenged American gun culture and therefore the tenability of the Second Amendment; it was a powerful indictment, but it changed nothing. Expressions of horror and sadness pour out on every occasion of the gratuitous loss of life to gun violence; yet the tragedies continue, and the Second Amendment stands.

This is an example of how a constitutional provision

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