“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”
— Justice Antonin Scalia, District of Columbia vs Heller, 2008
Freedom of the press does not protect libel. Freedom of speech does not guard child pornography. Freedom of religion does not allow human sacrifice.
And “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” does not include an individual license to nuclear warheads, nerve gas, shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles or, by long-standing and often upheld law, machine guns.
Thus the gun-rights absolutists in Utah and elsewhere are up in the night when they object to the recent decision by the Trump administration to ban the device known as a “bump stock.”
Said doohickey is something that can be attached to a legal semi-automatic weapon and cause it to fire more rapidly, simulating the speed at which prohibited automatic weapons can spew bullets over a larger area.
An area as big as, oh, thousands of people innocently enjoying a country music concert on the Las Vegas Strip.
After such an event last year turned into the largest mass shooting in American history, people who had never heard of bump stocks before called for them to be banned.
If there is such a thing as a “common-sense gun regulation,” this is it. And last week, after the suitable process for such regulations was completed, it was set to take effect in March.
Of course, some people object to the move, calling it an infringement of civil liberties and a step down a slippery slope to tyranny.
It is nothing of the sort. Though, in truth, the move may be more symbolic than effective, it is also a wholly reasonable step toward reducing, if not eliminating, the threat of mass murder in public places.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case was the first ruling in American history to establish that the Second Amendment applied to individuals, not just a “well-regulated militia." In his majority opinion, Scalia went on at great length to detail the intersecting history of the law and firearms in America.
He held that the amendment is meaningless unless it extends its protections to individuals rather than only organized militias. But he also, in deference to constitutional principles in general and the “well-regulated” part of the amendment in particular, denied the idea that there can be no limits or regulations on the personal ownership of weapons.
We may be forever debating exactly where the line between individual empowerment and public peace is to be drawn, as the law struggles to keep up with the inventive nature of the arms race. But the ban on bump stocks is very much within the realm of reasonable limits.