Don Pesci: ‘Common sense’ and Connecticut’s gun laws

AR-15-style guns

VERNON, Conn.

Perhaps someone in Connecticut’s General Assembly should propose a law forbidding legislators and state officials from misusing the expression “common sense” and its derivatives.

“The nation’s highest court,” a Hartford paper reported in late June, “overturned a New York law that dates back to 1913 and says that applicants need to show ‘proper cause’ that they need a gun for self-defense in order to obtain a license that they could carry the concealed weapon in public.

“But the court ruled 6-3 that the New York law ‘violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.’”

The ruling produced a spate of objections from Connecticut politicians in which the expression “common sense” and its derivatives were painfully iterated by so called “gun control advocates.”

William Tong, Connecticut’s attorney general, advised that Connecticut gun-restriction laws, different than those of New York, are not “immediately impacted” by the high court’s ruling. However, Tong nevertheless characterized the ruling itself as “a radical rewrite of the court’s prior positions on the Second Amendment and states’ rights to pass common sense gun-safety legislation.”

Tong left it to others to explain how a ruling that supported the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution could possibly violate common sense. And Connecticut “fact checkers” were unmoved by Tong’s notion that the court’s most recent decision was a “radical rewrite” of the High Court’s previous Second Amendment decisions.

In effect, the ruling says, in blunt language, that state licensing laws cannot be permitted to trump Second Amendment rights, a decision most commonsensical lawmakers would regard as commonsensical.

After quelling the notion that the high court’s decision might put in jeopardy Connecticut’s gun-restriction laws, Tong went on to characterize the court decision as “reckless.” The consequences “for public safety nationwide are dire,” he said, but not so dire as to dethrone Connecticut’s own gun-restriction laws. Facing such absurdities, common sense immediately took flight.

U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, suffering for years from a nagging bout of hoplophobia, an irrational fear of guns, characterized the Supremes’ decision as a spur to gun violence: “This deeply destructive decision will unleash even more gun violence on American communities,” Blumenthal said. “It will only put more guns in public spaces and open the floodgates to invalidate sensible gun-safety laws in more states. Worse yet, it is a significant step backwards at a moment when horrendous shootings happen across our country every day, taking too many beautiful lives and terrorizing generations of Americans.”

And, in keeping with a Democratic Party campaign theme, the court’s ruling, Blumenthal added, fails to uphold “common sense safeguards to reduce gun violence.” However, “This opinion in no way impugns the constitutionality of the common sense Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that the Senate should approve this week. As gun violence soars, Congress must heed the will of the majority of Americans who support gun-safety measures and break the legislative logjam to stop this senseless violence. This activist Supreme Court is once again legislating from the bench, but Congress must continue to legislate for a safer America.”

By upholding the clear language of the Second Amendment, the court is “activist,” and “legislating from the bench.” However, the court’s “activist” decision in no way “impugns the constitutionality of the common sense Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that the Senate should approve this week,” a bill fashioned by a refreshingly bipartisan Congress and Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, the other Connecticut senator, just in time for the 2022 elections.

Are Blumenthal, Murphy and Tong prepared to cease and desist attaching invidious labels to a court that upholds uncommonly sensible Bill of Rights amendments?

Neither Tong nor Blumenthal nor Murphy have yet argued that the court’s recent decision subverts the Bill of Rights.

Surely none of these supposed constitutional scholars believe that licensure, often overused to subvert commonsensical processes, should take precedence over constitutional provisions such as the Second Amendment – “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” or the Fourteenth Amendment -- “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” ?

Neither Blumenthal nor Murphy has been asked why their compromise legislation could not have passed bipartisan muster if offered immediately following Connecticut’s Sandy Hook massacre. Nor have they been asked to explain why murders involving guns in the nation’s urban areas have not been halted – say, in Chicago and Hartford, Connecticut’s capital – by highly restrictive gun laws.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Try a well-regulated militia to reduce massacres

The Battle of Lexington, on April 19, 1775. Blue-coated militiamen in the foreground flee from the volley of gunshots from the red-coated British Army line in the background with dead and wounded militiamen on the ground.

— Amos Doolittle (engraver)

MANCHESTER, Conn.

As with the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and the supermarket massacre in Buffalo, the school massacre in Uvalde has brought forth the usual legislative prescriptions to prevent a recurrence, prescriptions often delivered by bloviating politicians pretending to virtue. But the prescriptions seldom have much application to the atrocities that prompt them.

The private-sale exemption in the federal law requiring background checks for gun purchases should have been closed long ago. Even most supporters of Second Amendment rights favor ending it, and no sense can be made of the opposition of Republicans in Congress. But the purchases of the guns used in the Newtown, Buffalo and Uvalde massacres cleared background checks. The gun used in the Newtown massacre was stolen by the young perpetrator from his mother, who became his first victim.

That perpetrator was known to be disturbed but no "red flag" law would have had any effect on him, since the gun wasn't his.

The perpetrators of the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres seem to have been mentally ill but not ill enough to have been reported to authorities, so a "red flag" law would not have impeded their purchases.

While "red flag" laws sound good, and Connecticut has one, they raise civil rights and due process complications even as not all mass murderers give actionable warnings.

"Safe-storage" requirements make sense too but would have meant nothing with the Buffalo and Uvalde cases. "Safe storage" might have been preventive in Newtown but the perpetrator lived with his mother and was her companion on the shooting range and likely knew where the keys were kept.

Yes, "ghost guns" should be banned too but were not used in the massacres.

Then there is outlawing "assault rifles" -- that is, scary-looking rifles. The real objection to them is their semi-automatic properties -- that they automatically reload the firing chamber. But then most guns manufactured in the last century automatically reload and most rifles and handguns in the United States are semi-automatic.

Should civilian possession of semi-automatic rifles be banned? If so, it will be hard to ban one model without banning them all. Americans own tens of millions of them and few are registered, so confiscating them might not be terribly successful or effective.

Banning the sale and possession of semi-automatic rifles also might run afoul of the Second Amendment, since such rifles are so common and basic. But at least advocates of outlawing semi-automatics -- essentially national gun confiscation -- get far more relevant than other advocates of more gun restrictions.

Of course, there are also many mass shootings with mere handguns, like the one in Manchester, Conn., in 2010 in which eight people were murdered. So should handguns be banned too?

Who in politics wants to get relevant enough to propose repealing the Second Amendment?

But like immigration and abortion, guns are an issue the political parties seem to prefer sustaining rather than resolving.

Democrats blame the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers for blocking more gun regulations just as they blame misogynistic men for limits on abortion. But there are heavily pro-gun and anti-abortion states and heavily anti-gun and pro-abortion states not because of the NRA, gun manufacturers, or Planned Parenthood but simply because many people feel strongly about the issues one way or the other.

Members of Congress are reflecting the views of their constituents.

So what might be politically possible to prevent mass shootings in a country with hundreds of millions of guns among a population with tens of millions of mentally ill or unstable people, including millions of boys growing up in broken homes without much parenting, like the killer in Uvalde?

The Second Amendment itself makes a suggestion: "a well-regulated militia." That is, what about a carefully trained, uniformed and armed volunteer national police auxiliary to help guard soft targets like schools and hospitals and to be visible everywhere in ordinary life?

After all, if guns aren't going to be confiscated, why not put some where they might provide a little protection?

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: 'Bring out your dead'? Nullification hypocrisy

Secobarbital is one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for physician-assisted suicide in the United States.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What should the legislation now making another appearance in the Connecticut General Assembly be called: "aid in dying" or "assisted suicide"? It depends which side you're on.

"Aid in dying" makes it sound a lot nicer, just as "pro-choice" has become the euphemism for "pro-abortion" or, more fairly, "pro-abortion rights." Meanwhile there is no getting around it: "Suicide" signifies desperation and despair.

The bill would authorize doctors to prescribe fatal doses of medicine to terminally ill people who want to end their lives. They might have various motives -- chronic pain, invalidism, reluctance to become a burden on their families, or severe depression.

The bill's opponents contend that pain almost always can be controlled medically now and that there would be great risk of hustling the afflicted into dying for the convenience of others. The bill's advocates say it contains regulations against that.

This trust in regulations may be a bit naive since government can't always be around when it is needed. Who can forget the "bring out your dead" scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail? That's where the wheelbarrow master collecting corpses amid a plague declines to accept a frail old man who is being carried out by a young relative while still alive. The wheelbarrow master says, "I can't take him like that. It's against regulations." But a little cajoling by the young relative produces the "aid in dying" necessary to get the old man loaded aboard -- a quick and surreptitious clubbing to the head.

On the other hand, can government be trusted to tell people what they can do with their own lives? Who else's business is it really? How is the "war on drugs" working out?

In his play Julius Caesar Shakespeare inclines to the libertarian side of the issue as the conspirators discuss the risk of failure of their plot to assassinate the emperor and restore the Roman republic.

CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, you gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, you gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.

CASCA: So can I.
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.

Good for the Catholic Church in Connecticut for citing the sanctity of life in opposing "aid in dying." But far more lives -- mostly young ones -- are lost or jeopardized every day because of practices and policies that neither the government nor the church bothers to get upset about or even examine.

After all, in the long run we're all terminally ill even as the short run is often one blind spot after another.

xxx

NULLIFICATION CATCHES ON: Republican-leaning states that support an expansive view of Second Amendment rights are considering legislation to nullify federal gun laws, especially now that background-check legislation has a good chance of passing Congress. But somehow this nullification movement seems to have escaped the denunciation it deserves from Connecticut's congressional delegation, all of whose members support stronger federal gun controls.

Could such denunciation be lacking because no one in authority in government in Connecticut has any business criticizing nullification elsewhere? For Democratic-leaning Connecticut long has been engaging in more nullification than any state since the civil rights era of the 1950s and '60s. Connecticut's nullification is aimed against federal immigration law, as the state obstructs federal immigration agents from doing their jobs and issues driver's licenses and other forms of identification to immigration lawbreakers.

The Republican-leaning states are only contemplating nullification. In Connecticut it is aggressive policy.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

The GOP's un-'well regulated' gun fixation

First muster of the Massachusetts Bay Colonial Militia, spring of 1637

A couple of AR-15s

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

It says something about the current state of the  gun-obsessed Republican/QAnon Party that Rhode Island’s Republican Conservative Caucus is raffling off firearms, including an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, to raise money to elect more alleged “conservatives’’  (translation: far-right “populists’’) to the state’s General Assembly.

The quote below is from the then-retired U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger (1907-1995) in 1990.  The Second Amendment interpretation  by this  true conservative judge  was generally the one held by the Supreme Court until far-right appointees of Republican presidents, in league with the gun lobby, began to take over the court. He was chief justice in 1969-1986.

“The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.’’ 

The Second Amendment:

“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.’’

Note that the Founders wrote not only “Militia” but  also “well regulated,” in those days before assault rifles….

A 'well-regulated Militia'?

The Lexington Minuteman monument (1900), representing Massachusetts militia Captain John Parker in the Revolutionary War.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

‘In an increasingly divided America there’s been an unfortunate increase in the number of officials in a few localities refusing to enforce federal and state laws that they publicly oppose, in some cases as part of trying to curry favor with certain powerful constituencies. Thus, mayors of “sanctuary cities,’’ such as Providence, with large illegal-immigrant populations have taken it upon themselves not to cooperate, in some cases, with federal immigration officials. The Feds, not the states or cities, have final jurisdiction over immigration matters!

And then we have some officials in such towns as semi-rural Glocester and Burrillville, R.I., seeking to make their communities “Second Amendment Sanctuary Towns’’ in which the local police departments are, it is implied, not to enforce state gun-control laws that they don’t like. Such towns could exercise, in the words of the Burrillville Town Council, “sound discretion when enforcing laws impacting the rights of citizens under the Second Amendment.’’ In other words, they’ll enforce what they want.

Reminder: The towns and cities are legal children of the state, and their officials are required to follow state law.

Burrillville’s Town Council has already acted, promising, among other things, not to fund storage space in the town for firearms seized should the legislature enact a law that “unconstitutionally infringes upon the right of the people of the Town of Burrillville to keep and bear arms.’’ Glocester may soon follow. So the towns will determine what is “constitutional’’?

In other words, such towns would break state laws in order to have as little regulation as possible of guns. For some people these days, the Second Amendment is the only constitutional amendment they’re interested in.

Speaking of regulation, the Second Amendment reads:

“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.’’ (Italics mine.)=

For many years, the “regulated bit’’ was taken by both Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington to imply that careful gun control was both constitutional and necessary. But with the GOP’s rightward ideological march and the southward and westward direction of its votes, and Republican presidents’ selection of hard-right federal judges, amidst the growing lobbying power of the NRA and the gun-making trade, that changed.

Anyway, America’s federal system of laws will be gravely damaged if many more localities decide to only help enforce the state and federal laws they like. It’s not supposed to work that way.

Don Pesci: Progressive hope springs eternal in Conn. and Calif.

"Hope Remained,'' by George Frederic Watts.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of a passionate intensity” – William Butler Yeats

The Politico story came as a shock to no one: “California Democrats decline to endorse Feinstein.”
 

Connecticut has been blue roughly forever; ditto California, the political eagle’s nest of moderate Democrats turned progressive. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, long a Democrat moderate, did not convert quickly enough. Then too, progressives, full of a passionate intensity, find protestations of progressivism dripping from the lips of moderate, long-serving Democrat political fixtures sadly wanting. If tomorrow Feinstein said she was backing a recent move to withdraw California from the union – a prospect eagerly awaited by national conservatives -- no one on the progressive side of the political barricades in California would believe her. Lions want red meat, not well cured moderate puff pastries.
 

The same holds true in Connecticut, which is why nearly all of the seven members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been loud-barking progressives. U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal want to abolish the Second Amendment – without abolishing the Second Amendment. They have fastened on the AR-15 and school shootings to pry loose the bolts attaching the amendment to the U.S. Constitution, about which progressives historically have cared little, progressivism being the doctrine that agitation rather than definition is crucial to maintaining democracy.

President  Obama often reminded the country, in word and deed,  that the Constitution really was a list of negative rights – “Congress shall make no law…” blah, blah, blah.’’ What was needed, however, was a Constitution of positive rights – “Congress shall support, say, Obamacare.” President Woodrow Wilson – the first Democrat progressive president, Teddy Roosevelt being a Republican – felt the same way. What the country needs are muscular chief executives like … well… Obama and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy.

In both states, California and Connecticut, the progressive base has driven politics to the left. If there are any remaining moderate Democrats in Connecticut circa 2018, they are hiding behind the flower pots, cowering in fear from such as California state Senate leader Kevin de León, whom Democrat nomination delegates supported over Feinstein by a 54 percent to 37 percent margin.

“The outcome of today’s endorsement vote,” de León said, “is an astounding rejection of politics as usual, and it boosts our campaign’s momentum as we all stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a complacent status quo. California Democrats are hungry for new leadership that will fight for California values from the front lines, not equivocate on the sidelines.”

De Leon appealed to Democrat delegates as “an agent of change,” intimating that Feinstein was, as Politico put it, “a Washington power broker out of touch with progressive activists at home.”

Clearly, de Leon is the candidate of change, like Obama, that we progressives were waiting for: “I’m running for the U.S. Senate because the days of Democrats biding our time, biting our tongue, and trying to let it work the margins are over. I’m running because California’s greatness comes from paths of human audacity, not congressional seniority.” The full title of Obama’s passionately intense book is The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Progressivism, trickle up democracy, was the same dream that danced in the brains of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Eugene Debs, a socialist candidate for president, a precursor of socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

California, de Leon neglects to mention, has been run by progressive Democrats for more than a half century. And the result? In San Francisco, “Software engineer Jenn Wong decided to start a project she calls Human Wasteland, which maps the city’s poop problem based on 311 calls from 2008-2015. Every call is listed as a poop emoji. The result is an overwhelming indictment of California’s approach to homelessness and lawlessness… San Francisco has joined Los Angeles and San Diego as three of the major cities that have caused Gov.  Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency due to a Hepatitis A epidemic currently brewing in each location.” The outbreak “was caused by strains of the 1B genetic subtype, which is rare in the United States and more commonly found in the Mediterranean and South Africa. It is spread through contact with feces, putting people with inadequate access to sanitation at highest risk.”

The political map in Connecticut is similar to that of California. Progressives are everywhere, taxes are high, businesses are fleeing, and government is broke, scurrying around in dark corners for tax crumbs. But in Connecticut, thanks in part to our inclement weather, a hepatitis A epidemic, 1B genetic subtype has been kept outside the gates. Here too, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of a passionate intensity, but hope springs eternal in the progressive heart, especially in California and Connecticut. Maybe de Leon can make the trains run on time, and clean up the poop.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Don Pesci: Pointless rhetoric after Alexandria shootings

From the hand-written copy of the proposed Bill of Rights, 1789, cropped to just show the text that would later be edited and ratified as the Second Amendment.

It took Hartford Courant editorial writers 10 plump paragraphs to reach their predictable corporate conclusion: “… Somehow this country must protect the fundamental right to assemble in peace, whether to talk politics or play ball or sit in school.  The way to do that is to limit the weapons that shatter the peace, not to silence the debate.”

There is little doubt that weapons may be used to shatter peace. That is the operative principle of all terrorists and anarchists. The weapons, as we have seen in recent days, may be various: suicide vests, trucks and knives – all assault weapons, an assault weapon being any instrument of death uses in an assault on human life, including, the editors of The Courant may be surprised to learn, an abortionist’s scalpel.

The attempted murderer who took up arms against Republican members of Congress at an Alexandria, Va., ballpark was obviously no respecter of the First Amendment, which includes the provision affirming a right of assembly. The right of assembly, prosecutors will tell you, is subject to some restrictions. Terrorists have no right to assemble to destroy, say, the Twin Towers in New York City. Republican and Democratic congressmen do have a right to assemble to commit legislation or to play baseball with each other in a false show of patriotic unity.

The victims who assembled to play ball in Washington were a) unarmed, and b) enclosed within a fence that made them easy prey for the shooter, who was shot dead by  Capitol Police officers on assignment to protect only one of the congressmen in the ballpark. Had the congressman not been there, the police would have been absent, and the other Republican congressmen in the ballpark  and their aides doubtless would have been systematically slaughtered.

It was the presence of armed police on the scene, good guns in the hands of the good guys, that prevented a mass slaughter. No one – liberal, progressive or Trumpian – would argue that a) the police should not have been armed, b) there is no moral difference between the shooter and Capitol Police, or c) rights of assembly or rights of free speech should be curtailed because, in an age of terrorism, the exercise of such rights provides killing opportunities for criminals and potential criminals. Indeed, Courant editors argue that Second Amendment rights should be curtailed to ensure a robust expression of First Amendment rights; though, of course, exceptions should be made in the case of professional defenders of the peace. Thank God that armed officers were present at the ballpark!

Very well then. The question arises: Will gun control that falls short of the abolition of the Second Amendment and universal disarmament get the job done? Will even such an extreme measure get the job done?

And the answer, booming in everyone’s ears, is – no, it will not get the job done. “The job” is to leave non-violent gun owners unmolested while preventing criminal access to assault weapons, an assault weapon being any weapon used in an assault; think for a moment of the average kitchen or car garage as an assault weapon armory.

The latest two terrorist assaults in London involved mass murder by vans, readily available for rent everywhere gun laws have been promulgated. London is a gun-restricted town. So is Chicago, whose gun laws are more restrictive than Connecticut’s.

A couple of months ago, Connecticut was deemed the murder capital of New England, and Connecticut’s gun laws in the post-Sandy Hook period are among the most restrictive in the nation. We have in our state gun-control laws that do not prevent gun crimes committed by criminals or potential criminals. Hartford and other of Connecticut’s large cities are shooting galleries in which the shooters are armed with weapons easily obtained by criminals and gangbangers, all of whom have slipped the gun-control snares fashioned by easily conned politicians.

So, then, the kinds of gun restrictions being peddled by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, are at best half-measures that will not and cannot prevent gun violence practiced by the average terrorist, anarchist or homegrown professional criminal. The protections offered by Connecticut's congressmen, are violence-prophylactics with holes in them.

Only the abolition of the Second Amendment, the confiscation of all guns in the United States, and an inescapable death penalty attached to all crimes committed with weapons might – might -- reduce gun crimes in the United States. Nothing short of such extreme measures might get the job done.

However, a disarmed general population elsewhere in Europe, enjoying themselves in cafes and rock concerts, has not fared well against terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests or armed with knives and murderous vans. Disarmed congressmen corralled behind a fence have not fared well against an enraged Bernie Sanders supporter who had expressed his violent distaste of a Republican president and Congress.

Connecticut’s restrictive gun laws have not brought the peace of lawful assembly to poor victims in Hartford who have barricaded themselves in their houses against gang and gun violence. Only armed and violent gangbangers and criminals are free to roam streets unmolested in Hartford, the most dangerous city in Connecticut.

Such extreme measures as have been mentioned here are not on the tables of Blumenthal and Murphy – just safe, pointless, vote-getting measures that touch only the lives of lawful gun owners.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Richard J. August: Founders clearly meant individuals' gun rights

Robert Whitcomb once again displays his anti-gun bias when he “guesses that the Second Amendment was far more about state militias than individual possession” of firearms (“More mental hospitals, please”, June 7 Providence Journal column). To be sure, the intent of the framers of the Constitution, principally James Madison, has been the subject of numerous conflicting decisions by courts at all levels of the judicial system. However, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2008 Heller decision clearly stated that the Second Amendment refers to the right of an individual citizen to own and carry a firearm. This, however, was not the only case in recent times that addressed this issue.

In a 1990 case involving the Fourth Amendment, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority in Verdugo-Urquidez that “the people” protected by the Second Amendment are “persons” and not a “well-regulated militia” as Mr. Whitcomb and other anti-gunners claim.

The Federalist Papers make clear that the Founders were wary –- some would say fearful -- of a large standing army that could be used by a tyrannical government. Hence, the Second Amendment reference to a militia involved a body of armed men at the state level that could counterbalance such a federal force. The militia in most of the states included all able-bodied males between certain ages who were required to turn out for a muster with a firearm suitable for military service and a specified amount of ammunition.

Madison made his position clear in “The Federalist Papers” number 46, where he referred to “a militia amounting to half a million men” The population of "free white males'' 16 and over in the United States in 1790 was about 808,000, out of total population of about 3.9 million.

The co-author of the Second Amendment, George Mason of Virginia, wrote “A well-regulated Militia, composed of Gentlemen, Freeholders and other Freemen was necessary to protect our ancient laws and liberty from the standing army....” In other words all able-bodied males made up the militia. Mason went on to describe the type of weapon, amount of ammunition and accoutrements that each militiaman was required to possess.

I am tired of people saying that “the militia” means the National Guard. The National Guard was created in 1903 –-more than a hundred years after the Constitution was written and ratified by the states.

I call Mr. Whitcomb’s attention to Section 22 of Article One of the Rhode Island Constitution, which reads, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. How does he suggest one interpret that language?

The state Supreme Court wrestled with that matter and decided that “the people” referred to were indeed a militia. One wonders who the justices believe the Rhode Island Constitution refers to in its preamble, which begins, “The people of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations...” Perhaps “the people” here are white, male landowners who were the only citizens allowed to vote when the document was written.

With respect to the title of Mr. Whitcomb’s piece, one wonders whether he is suggesting that the Ladd School {for the mentally disabled} and the former tuberculosis sanitarium at Zambarano State Hospital be reopened to house those who post whacky You Tube videos and disturbing messages and images on Facebook.

Richard J. August, of North Kingstown, R.I., is a cast member of the weekly radio gun talk show “Lock, Stock and Daria” on WHJJ.

Mr. Whitcomb responds: I'm not anti-gun; I even own a few guns (through inheritance). The dispute is over to what extent government can regulate their use, especially since the sort of guns available now did not exist in the Founders' day, to say the least.

More mental hospitals, please

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

While we know a lot about Elliot Rodger, the young man who murdered six, injured 13 others and then killed himself on a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., on May 23, we still do not know as much as we should to derive all the painful lessons; there are ambiguities galore. But his case has rightly energized the debate about gun laws and the fragmented American mental-health “system.”

I’d guess that the Second Amendment was far more about state militias than individual possession. Otherwise why did the Founders write in the amendment of the need for a “well-regulated militia” as its justification? (Especially note the phrase “well-regulated.”) Still, the amendment is badly written and it’s impossible to know for sure what the Founders wanted. Meanwhile, the firearms makers and gun-rights absolutists hold sway in Congress, whatever the public-opinion polls, and presumably will continue to do so for the indefinite future. (The one argument that gun-rights absolutists have that I think has a smidgen of sense is that our heavily armed population might make it more difficult for a dictatorship in Washington or outside invader to impose its will. Still, could they defeat military forces?)

Anyway, since the late ’60s and early ’70s, with the new drugs marketed as panaceas for severe mental illness, and the deinstitutionalization movement, which closed many mental hospitals, it’s been increasingly tough to commit people to institutions against their will.

Things got worse with the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, a part of which makes it agonizingly arduous for relatives to obtain essential psychiatric and other medical information about adult mentally ill people. We need to make it easier for families to obtain such information and then be able to act on it by obtaining a court order to involuntarily hold people who have shown themselves as potentially dangerous.

Legislation in Congress filed by Rep. Timothy Murphy (R-Penn.), Congress’s only clinical psychologist (Congress needs many more of them!), would help. It would encourage states to commit severely mentally ill people to mental hospitals or mandatory outpatient treatment by, among other things, loosening the privacy rules to give families more actionable clinical facts about troubled relatives.

But unfortunately it fails to speak to the need to build more mental hospitals, both private and state-run. Far too many of the mentally ill will not cooperate in outpatient therapy, be it sessions with therapists and/or taking medication. The fact is that some people need to be committed for long periods, and some for the rest of their lives. And that’s what happens anyway. We use our prisons for this function; at least half of America’s huge jail population is mentally ill in varying degrees, with many out-and-out insane.

At the same time, laws should be changed to more clearly limit the ability of people declared by a judge to be mentally ill to buy guns. Further, there should be more legal mechanisms to let police obtain warrants to take firearms away from people deemed dangerous. (And, yes, I know that Elliot Rodger stabbed to death three of his victims. But it’s far easier and faster to kill people with guns than with any other weapon except of course with what a competent bomb maker could make.)  Look at the mass murders of recent years.) As it is, the police have remarkably little legal power to stop crazy people from perpetrating violent crimes.

Will any major reforms involving the interface of guns and the mentally ill actually be implemented? Yes, though it may take a few more massacres. Meanwhile, who will lead to the way to build more mental hospitals to hold and treat people for whom outpatient treatment may be insufficient? Liberals and some libertarians will complain about the threat to civil liberties, conservatives about the cost. But what about the right of citizens not to be imperiled by crazy people walking around, and what about the huge financial cost of law enforcement and incarceration for so many of these people?

***

Thus we begin another summer. (I take June 1 as the real start of the season.) First comes lushness and freshness — “And what is so rare as a day in June?” asked James Russell Lowell, the 19th Century New England poet. He went on, in romantic (corny?) Victorian fashion:

Now is the high-tide of the year,

and whatever of life hath ebbed away

Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfill it

Then it gets grittier as we go into July and the lawns turn brown. Then comes a renewed freshness, almost a second spring, but with dimmer light and school-return anxiety (whatever your age) toward the end. Faster and faster comes Labor Day.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees newenglanddiary.com.  He is a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and former  managing editor of several newsletters on mental and behavioral health.