It distresses me to hear conservative media figures like Tucker Carlson and Howie Carr jumping on the ‘we need to enforce the gun control laws we already have’ bandwagon.
We don’t need to enforce them. We need to get rid of them.
Consider this headline from Fox News:
A felony charge against Anthony McRae that was dropped in 2019 would have prevented him from purchasing the two handguns, which police say were obtained legally.
What was that felony charge? Carrying a concealed handgun without a license.
Should it be a felony to speak without a license? To attend a worship service without a license? To have a child without a license?
Note that while a tiny percentage of guns are ever used in a crime, and a tiny percentage of gun owners ever commit a crime, every crime is committed by someone whose parents had a child. Letting people have children is orders of magnitude more dangerous than letting people carry guns could ever be.
It’s tragic that McRae used his handguns in such an awful way. And there are, perhaps, many things that we might do to reduce the number of similar incidents in the future.
But those things must not include requiring licenses to exercise fundamental rights — those rights that precede government, and that government is formed to protect.
As Clarence Thomas explained in NYSRPA v. Bruen:
The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not “a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.” We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.
The law that McRae wasn’t prosecuted for breaking shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
But every time someone calls for ‘enforcing the gun control laws we already have’, it legitimizes the idea that you should have to ask the government for permission to defend yourself — and by extension, to exercise any of your fundamental rights.
One of the first things we teach children is that the ends don’t justify the means. Unfortunately, when tragedy strikes, it’s also one of the first things that is forgotten, even by people who should know better.
So please, please, please: Stop saying that we should enforce laws that require you to beg for permission to exercise your fundamental rights, laws that shouldn’t even exist. The felony charge you avoid may be your own.
