Leave aside the fact that the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to keep and bear arms. The amendment’s language doesn’t say the people have the right to keep and bear arms. It says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The Founders were careful with language (many were lawyers), so they made sure that the Second Amendment — which is a government document describing a specific government power — did not say the government could give the people the right to keep and bear arms, because a government that can give the people a right can also take it away. So they wrote the Second Amendment to acknowledge that the people already have the right to keep and bear arms and the government can’t interfere with — “infringe” upon — that right.
Therefore, the only constitutional way to take away this right is a constitutional amendment repealing the Second Amendment, but even if Congress approved that amendment with a two-thirds majority (a big “if”), you need three-fourth of the states — meaning 38 of the 50 states — to ratify it. Good luck with that because there is little to no chance that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona, Louisiana and Montana would ratify such an amendment, so there goes your 38 states.
Given that, let’s focus instead on the one commonality of all recent gun-related killing sprees. Mental illness. In almost every case the shooters were mentally unstable, making them paranoid, psychotic, delusional and/or suicidal, which is why most of them, after killing their victims, killed themselves.
So while gun owners and gun-control advocates argue over the number and effectiveness of the existing laws relating to gun use, what if we began arguing over how best to address mental illness? What new programs, government or otherwise, might help cure the mentally unstable, or prevent them from doing harm?
Also, what new laws would keep guns away from the mentally unstable?
Should someone be liable for prosecution if he sells a gun to someone that the seller suspects, or has reasonable cause to believe, is mentally unstable and therefore a threat to the public? Should someone who suspects that a person is mentally unbalanced and potentially dangerous be required to inform the authorities of his suspicions?
Granted, legal language regarding potential, as opposed to actual, human behavior is a tricky thing, and on an issue this sensitive we’d have to proceed cautiously for fear of clashing with the people’s rights.
But it’s certainly worth more attention, including a national debate, because mental illness is unquestionably a significant contributor to gun-related deaths, and it’s likely to remain so.
