James Gill: Gun supporters can be overwrought, but this Democrat is proving them

As the resident bleeding-heart pantywaist around here, I get used to nasty emails from gun nuts, but last week’s barrage of vitriol knocked me sideways.

This time was different, but I can’t just sit sobbing in a corner. I must man up and bite the bullet. It is my painful duty to concede that the nuts may have been right when they said that, once the Democrats were in power, they would come after everyone’s guns.

When Joe Biden won the presidential election, gun sales went through the roof as they always do when Democrats prepare to take over. The rush to get rodded up when liberals appear at the gates has until now seemed alarmist, if not paranoid, given that the Second Amendment is inviolable. But gun fans can finally cite evidence for their fear that a Commie plot is afoot to disarm them and usher tyranny in.

Inviolable the Second Amendment may be, but the right to bear arms is “not unlimited,” as the NRA’s favorite U.S. Supreme Court Justice, the late Antonin Scalia, has conceded. When Biden proposes what he calls “commonsense” gun control legislation, therefore, there need be no argument, last week’s column concluded.

Alas, Kumbaya all round was not to be, and this was not a good time for such a provocative suggestion, because a bill pending in Congress seeks to curtail gun rights drastically. The bill has attracted much less ink than it deserves, perhaps because there were plenty of distractions in Washington at the time it was filed. Then-President Donald Trump had bamboozled hordes of his disciples with tales of a stolen election, and the Capitol riot took place two days later.

Bodies have continued to pile up on the streets of New Orleans, which has been a homicide hot spot for as long as anyone can remember, although even here it was shocking news when three brothers were shot to death in the course of one recent week.

Guns account for about 40,000 American deaths a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but, if that is the price of freedom, so be it. So say gun advocates, at least until someone dear to them is taken to the morgue.

Gun advocates like to quote Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s famous explanation for Japan’s failure to invade mainland America after Pearl Harbor. “There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.” Whoever fabricated that quote sure struck a chord.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has confirmed that government is entitled, or maybe obliged, to impose some limits on the right to bear arms, a member of Congress from Texas, of all places, wants to pry guns from American hands long before they are cold and dead. Under Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill, nobody under the age of 21 would be allowed to own a gun.

All firearms and ammunition would have to be registered and licensed. Applicants for licenses would be required to pass a criminal background check and a psychological test. Safety training would be mandatory. Successful applicants would be required to buy liability insurance. Ammunition with a caliber of 0.5 or greater would be banned. All guns would be listed on a database maintained by the Attorney General and available for public inspection.

Were such a bill to pass, there is no telling how many lives would be saved, but there would be plenty. That will be obvious to the most ardent Second Amendment devotee. It will be just as obvious to gun control believers that it won’t happen.

First, the bill will meet strong resistance from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress whose constituents cherish gun rights.

Second, in the unlikely event that the bill passed, it would never pass constitutional muster in the courts. The Second Amendment says the right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” so the bill would seem to go too far in its licensing requirement alone.

Gun control advocates are fond of pointing out that a license is required to drive a car, which, unlike a firearm, does not main and kill by design. True, but automobiles are also different because the Founding Fathers failed to mention them in the Bill of Rights.

Imagine how the press would squawk if some member of Congress proposed to dilute the First Amendment by statute. What is good for the First must also be good for the Second.

Lee may never get her bill passed, but she will have made the gun nuts even warier of Democratic intentions.

Email James Gill at [email protected].