Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
The Bruen decision that struck down New York’s “may issue” laws has had a galvanizing effect on the anti-gun movement in this country, which can be seen not just in the defiant moves by Democrats in state legislatures to enact a number of new “sensitive places” where concealed carry is prohibited and adopt sweeping bans on so-called “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines, but by the increasing willingness to publicly adopt positions that are strikingly similar to those expressed by the most malignant abusers of civil rights back in the 1950s and 60s.
Take Boston University political science professor emeritus Walter Clemens, who believes it’s time for Congress to impose a poll tax of sorts on the exercise of our Second Amendment rights.
The Second Amendment does not prohibit private ownership of guns — but neither does it create an absolute barrier to any kind of government regulation. Some say the amendment bars limits on the capacity or caliber of individual weapons and background checks on gun purchasers. But aren’t governments expected to place reasonable regulations on what citizens do? The Constitution’s Article 1.8 empowers Congress to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.” So, we have many rules — set by local, state and federal authorities. For example, drivers are tested, licensed and taxed; so are autos.
Given America’s epidemic of gun violence, perhaps we should test, license and tax owners of weapons and the weapons themselves. As the Supreme Court in the Heller case noted in passing, the right to arms “is not unlimited and does not preclude the existence of certain longstanding prohibitions” such as those forbidding “the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill” or restrictions on “the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”
It’s a heckuva reach from “some people can lose their right to keep and bear arms” and “not every weapon is protected by the Second Amendment” to imposing a test and taxing the exercise of a fundamental civil right. You’d think a political science professor and good liberal like Clemens (who’s also the author of the book “The Republican Virus in the Body Politic: How to Reboot America”) would recognize that this idea has been tried before, when it was deployed throughout the south from the 1870s until the 1960s in order to prevent black citizens from voting. It was a practice abhorrent to the Constitution then, and his idea is just as loathsome today applied to Second Amendment rights.
Of course, the Jim Crow era had its share of gun control laws as well, and some of them remain on the books today. North Carolina’s permit-to-purchase law, established more than a century ago, is still very much the law of the land (though the subject of a current legal challenge as well) despite the fact that research shows black applicants are still routinely denied far more frequently than their white counterparts. And in northern states, gun control laws like New York’s Sullivan Act were originally put in place with an eye towards disarming immigrants and other “undesirables.”
Even today, when these statutes are supposedly applied in a racially neutral fashion, minorities can suffer disproportionate effects. And practically speaking, Clemens’ bold idea does absolutely nothing to prevent violent criminals from carrying out their malicious acts. Massachusetts, where Clemens teaches, has had a licensing law (which also requires passing a firearms course) in place for decades, and yet year after year it remains New England’s most violent state. The strict gun laws may help liberals like Clemens sleep better at night, but they’re certainly no hindrance to violent predators in places like Springfield and Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Not only that, they actively harm the good people living in bad neighborhoods by making it difficult if not impossible for them to protect themselves.
But even though there is ample evidence that turning the right to keep and bear arms into a neverending series of non-violent and possessory criminal offenses causes disproportionate harm to black Americans and other racial minorities, white liberals like Clemens can still engage their most paternalistic instincts without fear of offending their peers. This same phenomenon was at work in Minnesota on Friday, where a House subcommittee heard a number of bills that would create non-violent crimes like transferring a firearm without a background check. Among those testifying in opposition was Sarah Cade of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, who delivered a heartfelt plea to lawmakers to consider who, exactly, will bear the brunt of the law’s enforcement.