Congressman Jared Golden
1710 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Re: The Second Amendment
Honorable Congressman Golden;
I hope you will take the time to read a letter from a fellow veteran, written to you on this most important day. The tragedy your state has suffered at the hands of a trained but demented soul is unacceptable. As has been revealed by several media reports this mass shooting was, to my mind, completely avoidable had several layers of public authority truly paid attention to their most basic duty, public safety.
I applaud the courage of your carefully thought-out decision to publicly change your long-held opinion, and now to support and seek a ban on assault weapons such as were used by this madman. But I cannot agree based on the points I note below.
As we have learned in California, the definition of assault weapon is completely subjective. Besides AR-15 variations and look-alikes, there are many “more classic” semi-automatic rifles with large internal and external magazine expansions possible. Newer models of pump shotguns can carry up to 14 or more rounds, and others use 5 shot magazines. Are all of these to gradually be denied to law-abiding citizens as criminals and the divertible mentally ill migrate to them? Eventually semi-automatic pistols may have to be included as well. Our local county sheriff recently changed his deputies’ standard sidearm from .40 caliber (developed for the FBI to obtain necessary stopping power after a mass shooting incident in the late 1970’s) to 9mm, “to allow the deputies to carry more rounds given the firepower of criminals or mass shooters they now face”. One researcher noted decades ago that as law enforcement changed from revolvers to semi-automatics for similar reasons, the average shooting incident involved many more rounds fired but no greater rates of wounding or fatalities. Thus should those “excess rounds” make an additional good argument for removing hand-held “assault weapons” however they might be defined, from law enforcement as well as the law-abiding public? Note I don’t include devices that convert semi-automatic firearms to fully automatic, as accepted federal law deals with this category as only for military use.
Many argue that the Second Amendment to the Constitution confined the right to (own) bear arms to militias, mainly those formed by the states as part of their carefully delineated powers aside from (not below) the federal government. Recent Supreme Court decisions have, for now, put these arguments away. The Court opined that this is an individual right endowed, if not by our Creator, then by the foundational documents of our nation—the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and their embodiment and enforcement by the Constitution and its Amendments. The Court’s recent “originalist” interpretation requires any law(s) restricting this absolute right to be based in the historical traditions of the times when it was established. One recurrently violent individual, convicted but minimally punished for several criminal gun actions, has just tried to use this argument with the Supreme Court to regain his right to bear arms. In the times of the Framers no laws existed removing that right for threatening his spouse and various members of the public with a firearm or even shooting at members of the public. Hopefully the Justices will find a way to discard this method of enabling gun crime.
But that originalist idea of viewing the intent of the Framers at the time they constructed the Bill of Rights and especially the Second Amendment under the tutelage of George Mason (who viewed these issues as so fundamentally critical that he would not sign the Constitution or agree to it until the Bill of Rights was defined and approved) does perhaps bear on why “assault weapons” could be available to law-abiding citizens. Mason and all the others who debated long and hard on all other aspects of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights viewed the continued individual ownership of firearms for hunting, self-defense, and military use as critical to the survival of our young nation. All members of the Continental Army had been armed with previously civilian weapons of self-defense and hunting, and while military artillery was frequently of great import in winning our independence from the best equipped and best trained military in the world at that time, the main source of victory was the individual Continental rifleman. Few required any basic training in the use of their single shot muskets, and all quickly grasped the lessons of coordinated mass firing formations.
That same tradition of most citizens being fully familiar with and capable of using firearms when called upon served our nation well in local internal actions as well as the War of 1812 and later, most tragically, in our Civil War. Indeed, up to and through WWI most Americans called to military duty required little training in marksmanship and use of firearms, which, with few exceptions, still differed little from the firearms they used and carried daily. The first absence of skills in our potential citizen soldiery occurred in WWII, when, coincident with a change from largely rural to urban lifestyles our government discovered the need to develop extensive firearm training programs. This emphasis on the tradition of armed citizenry capable of being mobilized for national defense continued with the Citizen Marksmanship Program. Many thousands of surplus military rifles and pistols have been sold to law-abiding U.S. citizens through this program, which was the source of the 1917 Enfield rifle my father passed down to me.
Clear boundaries were needed. The deadly evolution of machine guns marked the first division between civilian and solely military firearms. This lawful division occurred perhaps due to the diaspora of the Thompson submachine gun, initially deferred by the military but rapidly adopted by our most vicious criminals of the inter-war period. The 1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol, developed strictly for military use when the Army’s revolvers were found insufficient in stopping crazed warriors in the Philippines and elsewhere, was the progenitor of the transition of hand-held military arms into civilian use. It was an effective “assault weapon”, for example used by Sgt. York, above and beyond his 1917 Enfield rifle, to stop an attacking crowd of German soldiers. That pistol, and perhaps the Browning automatic rifle, birthed the more convenient and effective civilian self-defense and hunting weapons so widely used today. And so frequently misused by criminals who illegally obtain and use them with seeming little consequence.
If we are to follow the Supreme Court’s reasoning with exactitude to its foreseeable limit, we might conclude the right to bear arms refers only to black-powder single-shot muskets and pistols. Common sense tells us that the true intent and meaning of the Second Amendment requires that the citizenry have access to most firearms except for those converted or convertible to fully automatic firing. As noted above, any definition of assault weapons would by lack of clearly definable characteristics require removal of virtually all firearms beyond revolvers and single-shot rifles. Whether one agrees with and assents to the current level of legal firearm ownership in our nation or not, removal of all such newly classified assault weapons is impractical, would convert countless law-abiding citizens into criminal firearm possessors, and would result in the remnant law-abiding populace being completely helpless before an unaffected criminal class. Armed peace officers cannot be omnipresent.
The disjuncture between disarming law-abiding citizens while, by current practice, leaving criminal and demonstrably mentally disturbed individuals minimally limited, is the basis of my final argument. As a long-term member of the NRA who favors responsible firearm ownership and use, I have been astonished at the inability or outright refusal of legal authorities in almost every venue at every level to strictly enforce current firearm laws. Nationally a high percentage of charged firearm violations are dropped or plea-bargained away by prosecutors eager to obtain at least a limited conviction on other crimes associated with the possession or use of a firearm and wanting to save the time, expense, and risk of a trial. Time and again with many of the recent mass-shooting events we learn that multiple warnings were made to authorities about an individual’s demented or terroristic intents towards individuals or the public, and yet minimal efforts were taken to interdict the individual with tragic results. Before limiting or removing a Constitutional freedom (which can only be done by Amendment, not Congressional fiat), we must first insist in the strongest possible terms that all current laws against the illegal acquisition and use of firearms be enforced to the maximum extent of those laws. The use of firearms in any criminal act must be viewed by our authorities and public as abhorrent as pedophilia or rape. Warnings to authorities about someone suffering mental illness who evokes threats against others, especially with firearms, must be viewed and treated in the same way as a terrorist threat—requiring immediate and maximal investigation and interdiction if found to be valid. Temporary restrictions on firearm possession can be contested in court in the same way other restrictions of personal freedoms are currently. Any such restrictions of possession of firearms, whether due to prior criminal activity or mental derangement, must be enforced continually with the highest priority. We already have many laws in many jurisdictions for that purpose that languish in disuse while victims, not of assault weapons, but of criminals and the divertible mentally ill, proliferate.
Please consider aggressive use of current law, not a new removal of Constitutional rights.