Handgun Madness at the U.S. Supreme Court

In his dissent, Justice Breyer noted that the D.C. law did not violate the Second Amendment, but rather protected an important interest – dealing with the life-threatening presence of firearms in our cities. He invoked the sobering statistics on handgun-related crimes, deaths and accidents in the District and in the nation as a whole, statistics which the D.C. council took into consideration when they enacted the law. (Once the law was enacted, according to one public health study, the city witnessed a decrease in gun-related deaths.) Breyer feared that this decision would open make gun control laws throughout the nation susceptible to constitutional challenges:

…Far more important are the unfortunate consequences that today’s decision is likely to spawn. Not least of these, as I have said, is the fact that the decision threatens to throw into doubt the constitutionality of gun laws throughout the United States. I can find no sound legal basis for launching the courts on so formidable and potentially dangerous a mission. In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas.

In a country such as the U.S. – with its long history of the gun as a tool of violence, oppression and genocide against African Americans and Native Americans, against women as victims of domestic violence who had few rights as far as the law and their husbands were concerned, and against defenseless children at home and in unjust wars of aggression abroad – the continued fascination with and accessibility of guns is troubling. This, in a nation with entrenched deprivation and poverty, a dearth of career opportunities yet a surplus of idle time for millions of young men, and widespread cases of mental illness that go undiagnosed and untreated. Consider that over half of the nation’s 30,000 annual gun deaths are suicides, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. Ninety percent of gun-related suicides are successful, as opposed to 2 percent of drug overdoses. And when guns are in the home, there is a much greater likelihood that someone in the home will die of a homicide (three times, according to the New England Journal of Medicine) or suicide (five times, according to the Journal of Trauma).