If you’re an American, you’ll know that John Paul Stevens was an Associate Justice in the U.S. Supreme Court, serving from 1975-2010. Although a registered Republican, his decisions put him on the liberal side of the Court.  He’s now 97 years old, but is still fired up (if that’s the right word) about the misconstrual of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  Let us look at Amendment before we read Stevens’s new op-ed in the New York Times (click on screenshot below):

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.

Read it again. The first part gives the rationale for the second, so that the “right to keep and bear Arms” is justified by the need to have a “well regulated Militia”. Militias were quasi-military bodies that the government, in colonial days, used to constitute the armed forces.

For many years, as Stevens notes, the Amendment was interpreted by courts as the government’s having the ability to regulate the possession of arms. That is, the Amendment was construed not as simply allowing Americans to have relatively unrestricted rights to own guns. (For a similar argument, see Garry Wills’s excellent article “To Keep and Bear Arms“, published in 1995 in the New York Review of Books.) Stevens begins by noting the groundswell of support for gun regulation evinced in last Saturday’s demonstrations.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “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.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Ah, how I long for the Burger court. . .

But how things have changed! And they changed for the worse (and seemingly for keeps) with the Supreme Court’s decision a decade ago in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court ruled, by a scant 5-4 margin, that the Second Amendment didn’t need the requirement of a militia: that it gave individuals to have the right to own guns for self defense. (The decision overruled Washington D.C.’s prohibition of handguns and restrictions on rifle storage.)  The majority opinion was written by the odious Antonin Scalia, while Stevens wrote the dissent.

Since then, gun ownership has proliferated, and with it the spate of shootings in nightclubs, schools, and other public places that culminated in last Saturday’s demonstration. The way to cure this, says Stevens, is simply to repeal the ambiguous Second Amendment. Referring to the Heller decision and the Amendment, Stevens argues this:

That [Heller] decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

He’s right, for as long as the courts interpret the Second Amendment in the wonky and right-wing way they have, the justification for widespread gun ownership will remain. And there’s no sign that the Court, which is even more conservative now than in Stevens’s Day, will reverse course. The only way to do an end-run around Scalia et al.’s stupid decision is to change the Constitution.

But of course that seems impossible. While there are several ways to amend the Constitution, the usual one is for a proposed amendment to pass both the Senate and the House by a 2/3 vote, and then be ratified by three-quarters of America’s states—all within seven years. (The time limit is why the Equal Rights Amendment, a no-brainer guaranteeing that equal rights couldn’t be abrogated on account of someone’s sex, failed.) Can anyone imagine the Congress even voting to send such an amendment to the States? And can anyone imagine that the ensuing confusion about what would happen with such a repeal would be cleared up before the time limit? And I’m not even taking into account the mouth-foaming, vitriolic, opposition of the National Rifle Association and the power and money it would muster to block such a move.

Stevens’s suggestion is a good one in principle, for it eliminates the Constitutional ambiguities that have led to virtually unrestricted private ownership of guns.  But what would replace it? A farrago of state laws, some even more lax than the ones we have today? Federal laws with even stricter gun regulations?

My own stand on guns is that they should be severely restricted along the lines that the UK has. No handguns, automatic or semi-automatic weapons, justifications and strict controls needed to own any firearm, and private ownership of such arms limited to shotguns and sporting rifles. (The UK of course has a much lower rate of gun violence than the U.S., but gun nuts make unconvincing arguments that regulation and deaths are unconnected.)

I don’t know how this will happen, but I dearly want it to happen, for too many lives have been taken away but morons who cling to their guns—or by innocents who accidentally discharge them. Statistics show that guns do not make people safer, for they wreak more carnage than they do in protecting homeowners.

When the shootings in Florida took place, I hesitantly suggested that perhaps this might mark a turning point in America’s attitude toward guns. And indeed, the demonstrations by young people, which greatly heartened me, made me think that maybe something will happen. But as the days pass, I fear the activism will wane, and we’ll be back to business as usual. In my own city, 499 people have been shot this year (91 killed), and someone is shot every four minutes. Can anyone stop the madness?

Over the past two days, the evening news has featured distraught, angry, and determined Florida students marching on the state legislature, stunned about the 17 students shot by Nikolas Cruz, but bent on ensuring that it won’t happen again. Many of the lobbyists were classmates of the slain students.  I thought to myself, “If anybody can change this country’s attitudes towards guns, it’ll be the young people who were the targets of those guns.” I hoped mightily that Florida, and then the country, would at last begin to respond. Dare I hope that this might be the turning point in the struggle against America’s senseless proliferation of weapons—especially assault weapons?

No chance. As I predicted, we’ll have a brief flurry of anger and calls for new gun laws, and then it’ll be business as usual. Far too many Americans see student lives as collateral damage to the necessary production and ownership of guns. That’s just sick.

Of course Florida turned a deaf ear to those students. As ABC 10 reports, just one day after the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School went to Tallahassee, Florida to lobby for gun control at the state capitol, the House voted down a motion to ban assault weapons like the AR-15 used by Cruz. The vote wasn’t even close: 36-71.  And it’s ASSAULT WEAPONS!  There is no reason to allow these even if you think that the Second Amendment should permit personal possession of weapons for self defense.

The students were devastated, as they should be, watching a bunch of Republicans vote down sensible restrictions on the very gun that had shattered the bodies of their friends. They watched and wept:

And Dinesh D’Souza, odious human being that he is (he’s supposed to be a pious Christian), brutally and cruelly mocked these students on Twitter:

How lame a human being must you be to say things like this? Reader Pliny the in Between adds a comment:

h/t: Grania, Hempenstein

This article in the New York Times (click on screenshot to go there) says that the “answer” to the deeply worrisome problem of mass shootings lies in both the number of guns we have, the ease of procuring them, and the ability to get guns in the U.S., like semiautomatic weapons (or ones that can be converted easily to automatics), that can do far more damage than simple rifles or pistols. The article rests largely on a study done in 2005 by Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama, a study I haven’t read.

The study (and article’s conclusion: “The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.”  To demonstrate this, the author (and NYT) show some data, including this correlation between the number of guns (showing how much of an outlier the U.S. is) and the number of mass shooters:

Well, of course this is a correlation, and we all know that correlations don’t show causation, as there are third variables that could increase both, like an increased propensity of Americans to be criminals, which could prompt the acquisition and the using of guns. But that’s taken care of in data below.

Further, if you eliminate the U.S from the graph as an outlier, it’s hard to see much of a positive correlation for the rest of the countries (it may well be there, but you can’t really tell from the plot alone), which is what you need to establish to see if there’s a general relationship between gun ownership and number of mass shootings. You’d also want to control for population size, for what we want is not the number of guns and mass shootings, but the number of guns per person and the number of mass shootings per person.

All this appears to be taken care of in the next bit, which shows this figure:

As you see, the U.S is an outlier along with Yemen, the only country that has a higher number of mass shootings—and also has a high rate of gun ownership. If you remove these two countries, and look at the remaining dots, it’s not clear to me that there’s a correlation here, either, but it’s hard to tell (no statistics are given).  But the article also notes that the relationship holds even when you remove the U.S., so I’ll trust Lankford here.

Further, if you look at confounding factors that may explain a correlation without saying that the cause of mass shootings is guns, they don’t appear to be involved. Lankford found, for instance, that there is still a relationship when you control for homicide rates, general criminality (the U.S. “is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries”) and the rate of mental illness, which doesn’t appear to be higher in the U.S. than in other “wealthy countries”. (How would that cause a spurious correlation? Well, if Americans were more mentally ill than inhabitants of other countries, the disturbed people might go out and get more guns and then use them to kill others, so that the causal factor wouldn’t be availability of guns, though it would still involve gun ownership.) At any rate, countries with higher suicide rates have lower rates of mass shootings, the opposite of what you expect if the rate of mass shootings were correlated with the type of mental illness that lead to suicide.

There are other data as well:

America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

You can read the article for yourself, as I don’t want to simply regurgitate the data, but it all points to the fact that the easy accessibility of guns in America, the lack of gun controls, and the kind of guns that we can buy, are the variables that best explain the number (and rate) of mass shootings in America. (Note that this article doesn’t deal with individual homicides, but there are other data on those issues that implicate the accessibility of guns.)

In the end, the problem seems to come down to America’s Second Amendment, which was intended to allow arming of a militia, but has been interpreted (wrongly, I think) by U.S. courts as allowing fairly unrestricted individual ownership of guns—no militia needed. That Amendment appears to have fostered a sense of entitlement that we should have guns—that it’s our right. Barring the Second Amendment, you’d have a hard time justifying that we have a “right” to own such lethal weapons. (I’m always dubious when “rights” are asserted as arguments, but they become prima facie legal rights if they’re in our Constitution.)

Referring to the tighter gun laws of Switzerland (even though they’re second to the U.S. in the rate of gun ownership, the rate of Swiss gun homicides is far lower), the article notes this:

Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

And it is that Second Amendment that makes us think we have a right to own guns. Would that we could repeal that Amendment, but of course that wouldn’t end the problem, for we’d still have to legislate firearm laws for each state under the amended Constitution, and in a populace that largely thinks they have the right to have guns. The idea that we have such a right is alien to me, but it’s so deeply instilled in America that the problem seems harder to solve than that of Donald Trump himself, who, after all, will be gone in at most seven years. The article ends on a poignant note, one that shows how deeply sick we are with our guns fetish:

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”