It's time for America to cast aside its rigid, anachronistic codified constitution
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The calls for more gun control in the USA after the recent massacres will, as usual, hit a wall. This wall is known as the Second Amendment.
This 1791 amendment the the Constitution of the United States 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. ”
The drafters referred to items no more lethal than muskets firing lead balls. They did not consider how gunpowder weapons had been developed, and how these might be developed in the future. A constitutional amendment written for the world of 1791 is still being used in the era of automatic rifles and tungsten-coated armour-piercing rounds.
The problem is that the USA and other countries make use of a written, but also codified constitution. They are almost impossible to amend for changing circumstances, like progress in weapons technology. An El Paso-style massacre taking place in 1791 would require a whole posse of killers. Reloading a musket or flintlock takes about a minute. A single killer would be overwhelmed by unarmed shoppers after the first shot.
When the UK had a gun massacre in Hungerford in 1989, the murderer had used legally-owned automatic rifles. It took simple Parliamentary votes to outlaw them. When there was another gun massacre in Dunblane school by the owner of still-legal handguns, these were also outlawed, again by a parliamentary votes. No constitution stood in the way of public safety.
Contrary to popular view, the UK actually does have a written constitution. It is just that it is written down all over the place and not codified into a single document and made an object of reverence. It also makes use of tradition, custom, and practice. The UK has arguably been the most stable major power over the last 200 years.
The US Constitution that every President swears to uphold and protect was actually no protection against America’s most disastrous conflict, the American Civil War. The proportionate human and economic cost of that war was greater than any other war in American history. The driving issue was the abolition of slavery. By contrast, here in the UK the slave trade was abolished by a Parliamentary process, as was slavery in the British Empire some years later. The change was relatively orderly and considerably more peaceful than in the USA. When American slaves were freed, the US Constitution did not deliver to them the same liberty their former masters enjoyed.
American gun-owners argue that owning guns is the last line of defence against the tyranny of the state. This puts the safeguards of the US Constitution at zero. The creation of the USA was a reaction against the perceived tyranny of a colonial ruler. The US Constitution was devised with checks and balances against a monarchical concentration of power. To be backed by a rifle in every household renders the US Constitution worthless. If the price of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is regular gun massacres, this calls into question the whole point of American Independence. So far there have been 250 such massacres in the US this year.
The right of the American people to keep and bear arms has already been infringed. The term ‘arms’ could be applied to anything from thermonuclear warheads to bayonets. But it has been successfully restricted to side-arms with a calibre of no more than half an inch. Since the constitutional ‘right’ has been ‘infringed’ such that people cannot ‘bear’ tanks, bazookas or howitzers, it would be reasonable to infringe it a bit more. The argument that law-abiding citizens would be outgunned by criminals using illegal weapons is irrelevant.
Gun advocates argue that Nazi Germany forced Germans to hand over guns, and thus their liberty. However the rise of the Nazis was in part due to the poorly-written Weimar Constitution, as well as a national desire to evade the Treaty of Versailles. The Weimar Constitution had an article which allowed the President to suspend government and rule like a Kaiser. Given that Germany’s second President was Paul von Hindenburg, Imperial Germany’s co-dictator for the second half of the Great War, followed by Adolf Hitler, Article 48 might have not been such a good idea. Using Nazi Germany as precedent for gun ownership is bogus. But the rise of Nazism is another argument against a codified constitution.
America remains one of the greatest countries in the world, with marvellous people and stunning achievements for which every US citizen should be proud. The existence of the USA has, without a shadow of doubt, been of net benefit to the human race – and will continue to be so. However, it seems that these magnificent works and the promise of more are increasingly in spite of, rather than due to, what has become an outdated document.
