Fewer guns a good thing

The 19 friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the District of Columbia’s U.S. Supreme Court bid to uphold its handgun ban might look like the “usual suspects.”

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, U.S. Conference of Mayors, National Network to End Domestic Violence, police chiefs, criminal justice professors, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association.

Most of the “amici” (in legal lingo) on the district’s side have well-known stands on gun control and could be expected to argue that the Second Amendment doesn’t forbid local restrictions on personal weapons.

Then there’s the brief led by the American Jewish Committee. It speaks for 23 groups as diverse as the Baptist Peace Fellowship, Citizens for a Safer Minnesota and the Gray Panthers, but also for “certain individual victims and families of victims of gun violence.”

Families of 14 victims from gunman Seung-Hui Cho’s April massacre at Virginia Tech University, plus three of the injured themselves, are backing the District on gun control.

“Jeri and I don’t wish to take guns away from people who use them for hunting, target-shooting and self-defense in their homes and on their own property and would – perhaps – not even object to somebody carrying a weapon unconcealed in other places if they felt threatened in those areas,” Michael Bishop told me in an e-mail on behalf of himself and his wife.

“What we do insist on is the undeniable fact that firearms were, and are, designed to kill and that one should demonstrate competence and accountability in their use. We don’t believe that enacting even sensible gun legislation will prevent every murder by a firearm, … but we do believe that allowing … (everyone) who attempts to buy a gun to have that weapon, regardless of competence and accountability, will increase the number of firearm fatalities rather than lower them.”

The Bishops’ son, German instructor Jamie Bishop, was one of the 32 people killed that horrible day by Cho, a student who was able to buy weapons because his mental instability record hadn’t been sent to the federal background check database. Jamie Bishop’s wife, Virginia Tech professor Stefanie Hofer, also joined the amicus brief.

The basic argument of this coalition is that a federal appeals court turned the Second Amendment on its head in ruling the D.C. gun law unconstitutional.

Much of the debate about the Second Amendment focuses on whether it protects individuals’ right to bear arms or encompasses a collective right limited to those in state militias. The AJC brief argues that the amendment prevents federal big-footing on state and local use of militias to “protect public welfare and order” – and therefore doesn’t prevent restrictions on private firearms.

I have my doubts about the effectiveness of the District’s law. I still remember the night, almost two decades ago, that my husband and I saw a group of men fighting over a jacket across the street from our Capitol Hill home one evening. When one of them flashed a gun, we ran back inside and called the police – who promptly came knocking on our door, with fear visible in their eyes. The officers didn’t find the men we’d seen, but they confiscated a sawed-off shotgun down the street. I wonder how safe that neighborhood is now.

Many of those who’ll take sides in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (briefs supporting Heller aren’t in yet) will do it based on notions of individual rights or community safety that haven’t been formed by personal experience with gun violence.

It’s significant that families whose lives were shattered nine months ago have quietly taken the stand that more access to firearms isn’t a deterrent to other Virginia Techs.

Michael Bishop, a military veteran and science-fiction writer who lives in Pine Mountain, Ga., wrote an essay in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week opposing a pair of wrong-headed gun-related bills in the Georgia Legislature. One would remove restrictions on carrying guns at sporting events, church functions, political rallies, and colleges and universities. That’s a chilling prospect.

“Allowing guns in post-secondary schools, particularly in the hands of students, will most likely wind up facilitating suicides (students are at great risk of suicide already, greater than any other segment of the population) and turning what might otherwise be mere temper flare-ups into occasions of bloodshed,” he wrote in his e-mail.

“We don’t believe that we should take steps to turn the right to bear arms into an obligation to do so, especially on campuses where their presence in classrooms would undermine, or color, the civil verbal expression of ideas and disagreements, and where at least a student or two, perhaps many more, bearing a sense of home-fed entitlement and finding themselves disgruntled over a C-plus rather than an A, would undoubtedly take out their pique on the person who thus dissed them in a violent manner wholly unrectifiable for either shooter or human target.”

It’s an awful thought. But no longer unthinkable.