But from the perspective of gun owners a collective/state right isn't comparable to an individual right.
Decades ago the ACLU was quite anti-gun. The only reason they got roped into the gun debate (something of a pointless distraction for them) is because of their work with minority communities, their work in helping them deal with the consequences of increasing violent crime during the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular their help in strategizing responses to state and federal laws that they thought were causative or contributive factors of that crime. The ACLU began to believe that equality couldn't be promoted merely by defending the existing panoply of liberties; that to defend civil liberties you had to arm communities with new legal tools to fight what were perceived as biased and oppressive behavior maintained in the guise of equality and liberty. (Just like the original function of the states' rights debate was to protect slavery by appeal to notions of liberty.) And part of that biased behavior was state governments ignoring the plight of some black communities wrt to gun regulation. (As you alluded to, the the prejudice is laid bare by the fact that many of same people and institutions that are today rabidly anti-gun regulation were previously very much pro-gun regulation at the height of and in direct response to the Black Panthers and black power movements, and in particular the movements for them to become armed.)
From the the ACLU's perspective, smart gun regulations could help reduce crime without imposing any undue constraints on legitimate uses of guns. The ACLU and their supporters' notions of legitimate use are clearly in opposition to that of many gun rights proponents--at least the vocal ones who managed to define the debate.
So early on the ACLU provided assistance to communities and legislators writing laws which restricted gun use. And they weren't doing it out of concern about the breadth of those laws. Rather they did so to try to make them as broad as legally and politically possible. It would be sort of like the ACLU not only defending the KKK in a free speech law suit, but helping them write their propaganda. The former defends a principle, the latter is difficult to defend by saying you're just helping them to stay within the bounds of the law.
After the conservative movement gained steamed during the 1980s and 1990s, and after it thoroughly internalized the values and legal reasoning of the rabidly pro-gun rights movement, the ACLU began to see the writing on the wall. It also helped that there always existed conflict internally about their choice to take an official legal stance and to inject itself into the debate at the cost of considerable political capital on other issues. So the past 10 or so years has seen an unwinding of the ACLUs stance and remediation of the trouble it has caused them. That unwinding includes cooperation with the NRA on blocking some federal regulations. It was a very strategic assistance, though perhaps I'm being overly cynical. But from what little I've read internally it created some serious discord because a large contingent of support inside and outside the ACLU comes from the social justice movement, for which gun regulation is a huge issue.
In the next few years don't be surprised if they just silently move away from the issue altogether. I doubt they'll ever affirm an individual right, but they don't have to affirm it. The whole issue was always a distraction from more pressing and important work. Gun violence is a real problem, but it's not something the ACLU is well-situated in any shape or form to help deal with. Better to stop antagonizing guns rights activists, especially when it feeds political divisiveness at at moment when they need all the cooperation they can find fighting for voting rights. And the focus on voting will rightly serve as a distraction for the powerful interests that kept the ACLU in the gun debate for so long.
Plus, the debate is largely over. The law of the land is that gun rights are an individual right under the Federal constitution. End of story. I may disagree with their historical reasoning and some of their legal justification, but I accept that their decision provided finality to both the legal and and political debate. There are alot of unanswered questions, but I don't think they'll be at all consequential.
And for the record, I'm not anti-gun. I'm not afraid of guns. I've shot plenty of guns, including machine guns. I'm comfortable around guns. I'd like to see more open carry and less concealed carry. IMO too many politically left-leaning people have an irrational fear of guns. And while I don't deny that gun regulation could and arguably has limited crime in some countries, I don't think it would be particularly effective nor viable in the U.S. Our gun culture is too strong to make it politically viable, and our society is too violent (criminals and police) for it to really have any effect on street level violence. More regulation won't make the violence go away. What will almost certainly make it go away is less regulation of drugs. I'm not pro-drug, either, but I'll take stepping over more passed out heroin users on the streets than having to worry about dodging bullets. I'd prefer neither, but you can't have everything.
First, I appreciate your nuanced response about the ACLU.
> IMO too many politically left-leaning people have an irrational fear of guns.
The fact that you could place the word 'irrational' in front of 'fear of guns' at all, says a lot to me about your views. I don't think I would ever mistake you for anti-gun.
As someone who is from a rural area, has also shot plenty of guns (many if not most of them assault weapons), and leans left politically; I would disagree with the assumption that more regulation would not be effective or viable in the US. It has been shown many times that a majority of gun owners[1] (and an overwhelming majority of Americans in general) support universal background checks, it's mostly only the gun lobby that keeps it from happening.
You're never going to make all the violence go away. And I agree that changing how we deal with drugs may well make a bigger difference than gun control. However, it's hard for me to come up with an argument that justifies the right of every citizen to own and carry an assault weapon. And while a total ban on all assault weapons may be extreme, I think it's hard to believe that it wouldn't result in a reduction in homicides, not to mention mass shootings where the body counts would be much lower. Gun culture too strong? We're just too violent? If this was the case you would think we wouldn't need a huge gun lobby spending millions of dollars every year to fight sensible restrictions.
The Drug War didn't work out so well. It not only didn't stop the spread of drugs, it exacerbated the problem. It made it more violent.
I'm not saying that prohibition is never a useful tool. It often is. I just don't see gun regulations lessening the problem of criminal gun violence in the American context.
There are already too many guns in this country floating around, and the ones used for criminal violations are already possessed illegally. It'd be like banning cocaine when every household in the country already has a magically self-replenishing stash. Because gun rights are firmly established--before but especially after the Heller--you'll never be able to suppress either guns or ammunition to the point where either becomes sufficiently cost-prohibitive to criminals. It's not exactly cheap now anyhow. Even handguns aren't as easy to acquire on the black market as people think, let alone assault weapons. And a black man carrying an illegal gun is basically begging for life imprisonment whether or not he ever uses it to directly hurt or even threaten someone. Yet there's plenty of people running around with illegal guns, not so much because they're easy to acquire so much as because that's the culture--that's the flip side to our obsession with gun ownership, legal or otherwise. It was always that way. Most recently we mythologized it in the Western, but it's a rare area where the brutality of the fictional imagining was less than the reality. People in this country have always been shooting each other, especially the criminals. But even when they were legal we never had had problem with military-type assault weapons, with the exception of organized crime during prohibition.
(Anyhow, I'm not saying I support allowing everybody to buy assault weapons. My point is regulation should be less of an emphasis.)
We're less violent today than we were 100 years ago, but that's not because of gun regulation. It's because people naturally moved away from it, just like people are naturally moving away from smoking. Government policies coaxed the move away from smoking with public bans and taxation. Importantly, that helped shift the culture. But nobody ever once challenged an individual's right to smoke.
We can fight the gun culture and the culture of violence without having to antagonize what are entrenched and powerful political movements. Regulation isn't even the best approach, IMO.
I think gun regulation could have a very real effect on massacres. But those numbers, while tragic, are too small. It's sickening to say, but those tragedies can't sustain the political will necessary to impose stricter laws. And in any event, the prevalence of people with mental health disorders using guns is a reflection of our gun culture. I think this is one area where violence in movies and video games truly matters. But, again, the body count isn't big enough to sustain such regulation, and such content regulation raises even bigger constitutional issues.
Relatedly, guns are a big factor in suicide in this country. Stricter regulation might actually have a very real impact there, substantially reducing body count. But it might not. What's the degree to which guns are causative? I'm amenable to accepting, in light of the preliminary evidence, that it's high degree. But the sad fact of the matter is that in our culture there's little sympathy for white men committing suicide when their own hand guns. Again, I don't see the political will capable of sustaining meaningfully effective regulation. You can't substantially address the suicide issue without restricting private ownership of handguns in your own home. Assault weapons are feasible; it's no more possible to substantially restrict handguns in homes than it is reviving slavery. Mental health checks don't help very much because we're all prone to depression, and at times far removed from when the weapons are acquired.
Regarding some liberal-leaning people being irrationally afraid of guns: I don't think it's contentious that many people unaccustomed to guns are reflexively and viscerally fearful around guns and suspicious of anyone not in a position of authority carrying a gun. Just look at the responses of people in suburban coffee shops when people carry openly, or the public commentary discussing those incidents.
I get why they're fearful. They should be to some extent. But those same people will step in front of a car while staring at their iPhone while crossing the street. Sometimes they don't have the right of way. Even if they do, sometimes the car hasn't come to a complete stop. I don't know about you, but I never walk into the path of a car until it's going slow enough that I feel I could dodge it if the driver never stopped. In downtown areas with lots of pedestrians that I might have push through, that means I don't leave the curb until every car has come to a complete stop. But few people take that very reasonable precaution. (It's a tiny risk, but an extra second of standing costs me almost nothing, and it's one of the few risks you can so easily control.) While it's not per se irrational to make a different calculation, it is irrational to be more fearful of a gun in Starbucks than the car at the intersection. Both should be feared and respected, especially when you're in control of the machine. But usually you should be more fearful of the car, not the gun, especially when the car is pointed at you and the gun isn't.
The analogy is important because if you grew up in an area with lots of guns around, you don't have that reflexive fear of guns. Familiarity makes for a comfortable coexistence, and makes it easier to think more clearly about the issue. No doubt it's easier for you to think more clearly about it, no matter the conclusions you ultimately draw. People who don't understand that are too quick to judge and dismiss gun-rights proponents as irredeemably stupid or wreckless. And that fear clouds their ability to understand how people could both want a gun and also be trusted to own and use it safely. It feeds into the divisive atmosphere. I don't think guns are some inalienable right, and I don't adhere to the legal theories that have now enshrined those rights. But that lack of fear also makes it easier for me to understand the political costs of regulation, and their viability, and you and I can quickly come to terms with our fundamental disagreement. If you feared guns and thought no sane person whatsoever would want the privilege for himself, let alone for others, to carry around a weapon in public, what would it matter how effective gun regulation would be at stopping gun violence? Just ban them and move on. But that kind of unwillingness to appreciate different cultural values is how we end up with such a divisive political culture, which ultimately empowers extremists and demagogues. Yes, most people supported and still support sensible gun regulation, including most gun owners. But because substantial numbers of a certain type of left-leaning American (white, rich, urban) weren't comfortable joining forces with centrist gun owners--couldn't bring themselves to compromise their notion that there's no legitimate justification for widespread gun possession--they laid the ground work for the current situation. Their brinkmanship has resulted so far in the worst possible legal outcomes.
I can support brinkmanship and a refusal to compromise when it comes to voting rights, or when it comes to abortion and women's bodily autonomy. Those are principles I'm willing to risk everything for. But for guns right? Given all the equivocal evidence about the complex reasons and sources of gun violence? It was pointless and stupid for liberals to be and continue to be so intransigent. Political compromise sometimes means also having to compromise closely held values. And we need to learn to be able to do that more often, especially when our reasons for sticking to our guns, so to speak, are relatively weak compared to other serious issues of the day.
>> We're less violent today than we were 100 years ago, but that's not because of gun regulation. It's because people naturally moved away from it, just like people are naturally moving away from smoking. Government policies coaxed the move away from smoking with public bans and taxation. Importantly, that helped shift the culture. But nobody ever once challenged an individual's right to smoke.
We have less smoking because of government policies which led to better awareness that smoking is really bad for you (as you say), but we do have explicit policies stopping an individual from smoking, in restaurants and businesses. That person's right to smoke up was abridged to help improve the health of others around them.
Decades ago the ACLU was quite anti-gun. The only reason they got roped into the gun debate (something of a pointless distraction for them) is because of their work with minority communities, their work in helping them deal with the consequences of increasing violent crime during the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular their help in strategizing responses to state and federal laws that they thought were causative or contributive factors of that crime. The ACLU began to believe that equality couldn't be promoted merely by defending the existing panoply of liberties; that to defend civil liberties you had to arm communities with new legal tools to fight what were perceived as biased and oppressive behavior maintained in the guise of equality and liberty. (Just like the original function of the states' rights debate was to protect slavery by appeal to notions of liberty.) And part of that biased behavior was state governments ignoring the plight of some black communities wrt to gun regulation. (As you alluded to, the the prejudice is laid bare by the fact that many of same people and institutions that are today rabidly anti-gun regulation were previously very much pro-gun regulation at the height of and in direct response to the Black Panthers and black power movements, and in particular the movements for them to become armed.)
From the the ACLU's perspective, smart gun regulations could help reduce crime without imposing any undue constraints on legitimate uses of guns. The ACLU and their supporters' notions of legitimate use are clearly in opposition to that of many gun rights proponents--at least the vocal ones who managed to define the debate.
So early on the ACLU provided assistance to communities and legislators writing laws which restricted gun use. And they weren't doing it out of concern about the breadth of those laws. Rather they did so to try to make them as broad as legally and politically possible. It would be sort of like the ACLU not only defending the KKK in a free speech law suit, but helping them write their propaganda. The former defends a principle, the latter is difficult to defend by saying you're just helping them to stay within the bounds of the law.
After the conservative movement gained steamed during the 1980s and 1990s, and after it thoroughly internalized the values and legal reasoning of the rabidly pro-gun rights movement, the ACLU began to see the writing on the wall. It also helped that there always existed conflict internally about their choice to take an official legal stance and to inject itself into the debate at the cost of considerable political capital on other issues. So the past 10 or so years has seen an unwinding of the ACLUs stance and remediation of the trouble it has caused them. That unwinding includes cooperation with the NRA on blocking some federal regulations. It was a very strategic assistance, though perhaps I'm being overly cynical. But from what little I've read internally it created some serious discord because a large contingent of support inside and outside the ACLU comes from the social justice movement, for which gun regulation is a huge issue.
In the next few years don't be surprised if they just silently move away from the issue altogether. I doubt they'll ever affirm an individual right, but they don't have to affirm it. The whole issue was always a distraction from more pressing and important work. Gun violence is a real problem, but it's not something the ACLU is well-situated in any shape or form to help deal with. Better to stop antagonizing guns rights activists, especially when it feeds political divisiveness at at moment when they need all the cooperation they can find fighting for voting rights. And the focus on voting will rightly serve as a distraction for the powerful interests that kept the ACLU in the gun debate for so long.
Plus, the debate is largely over. The law of the land is that gun rights are an individual right under the Federal constitution. End of story. I may disagree with their historical reasoning and some of their legal justification, but I accept that their decision provided finality to both the legal and and political debate. There are alot of unanswered questions, but I don't think they'll be at all consequential.
And for the record, I'm not anti-gun. I'm not afraid of guns. I've shot plenty of guns, including machine guns. I'm comfortable around guns. I'd like to see more open carry and less concealed carry. IMO too many politically left-leaning people have an irrational fear of guns. And while I don't deny that gun regulation could and arguably has limited crime in some countries, I don't think it would be particularly effective nor viable in the U.S. Our gun culture is too strong to make it politically viable, and our society is too violent (criminals and police) for it to really have any effect on street level violence. More regulation won't make the violence go away. What will almost certainly make it go away is less regulation of drugs. I'm not pro-drug, either, but I'll take stepping over more passed out heroin users on the streets than having to worry about dodging bullets. I'd prefer neither, but you can't have everything.