Anyone who knows me will know I was pleased with today's Supreme Court decision striking down the over-restrictive Washington DC gun law. The court was clear: this does not mean states and cities have no ability to regulate firearm ownership and use. It means only that they cannot enact "blanket" bans because people DO have an individual right to bear arms.

I sincerely hope this means we can get on with a better national dialogue about what restrictions are reasonable and rational yet still consistent with this individual right--the way we do with speech, religious freedom, and the like. For far too long, gun opponents have clung to the mistaken notion that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" was totally controlled by the preceding clause about militias. They said a right to bear arms was not guaranteed in the Constitution, even though the words are plainly there. (Oddly, many of the same people say a right to an abortion is guaranteed by the Constitution, although the words are nowhere to be found.)

If we are truly moving past this part of the discussion, and lord I hope so, then perhaps we can start talking about reasonable limits to this individual right. No right is absolute, but this one couldn't even be discussed while we were arguing about whether it was a right. Maybe now we can start considering some rational distinctions between handguns and long guns in particular contexts, between urban users and rural users, between single-fire weapons and automatic, between solid projectiles and explosive devices.

I strongly suspect there's more potential agreement out there than most people give credit for. Put another way, I think a lot of reasonable gun owners would admit some restrictions are necessary and a lot of non-owners would acknowledge owners' underlying rights. I hope we can start working toward some common sense definitions and finally stop spending our time parsing clauses.

Arthur Farnsley's blog | login or register to post comments