“We don’t have to die like this. We don’t have to live like this.”
Those two sentences have become something of a mantra for Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I heard her say it in a morning news interview where she spoke about the recent shooting of a teacher by a 6-year-old boy.
Bill Leonard
A mother of five, Watts formed Moms Demand Action shortly after the massacre of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
The organization’s webpage describes it as a “grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence. We pass stronger gun laws and work to close the loopholes that jeopardize the safety of our families. We also work in our own communities and with business leaders to encourage a culture of responsible gun ownership. We know that gun violence is preventable, and we’re committed to doing what it takes to keep families safe.”
That same week, I heard a similar commentary from Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was among the 17 killed and 17 wounded on Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The shooter was a 19-year-old male. Fred Guttenberg has become one of the most prominent voices among parents directly impacted by school shootings.
Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg established the nonprofit Orange Ribbons for Jaime to honor their daughter by funding her varied social concerns, the most recent being Paws of Love, founded to “provide emotional support dogs to eligible individuals and families that are directly affected by gun violence.”
With the five-year commemoration of the Parkland tragedy upon us, Guttenberg explained this program is an effort “to help families impacted by gun violence,” adding ominously, “but I know another is just around the corner.”
“Firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children, surpassing auto accidents, cancer and COVID.”
Both Watts and Guttenberg reminded listeners that firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children, surpassing auto accidents, cancer and COVID, a 42% increase in the last two decades.
Not only children are dying
But it’s not only children. Guttenberg’s warning of more shootings gained momentum this month when the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas man who was under a restraining order due to threats against his onetime girlfriend was not subject to arrest although he violated state and federal laws forbidding the possession of firearms. He violated those laws by firing guns at cars, into a home and wantonly into the air after receiving the restraining order.
The court ruled that the defendant, “while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal,” essentially declaring the federal law forbidding such firearm possessions unconstitutional. The appeals judges said they were conforming to a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that gun control laws must be “consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.” This suggests that henceforth firearm legislation judged as lacking historical parallel to constitutional origins is in jeopardy, a judicial form of constitutional inerrancy.
If this interpretation prevails, then spouses and partners who experience or perceive physical threats from former lovers and seek restraining orders against them will be under threat of armed attacks by their “hardly model citizen” abusers. The six Supreme Court justices who voted for this change in firearm regulations constitute the same majority that removed Roe v. Wade to “protect the life of the unborn.”
Protecting the life of the born
But their body of rulings on the Second Amendment appear to make it more difficult to “protect the life of the born.” Best to expunge the term “pro-life” from our national vocabulary at least until we come to terms with Second Amendment realities.
“Best to expunge the term ‘pro-life’ from our national vocabulary at least until we come to terms with Second Amendment realities.”
One constitutional parallel seems clear. This ruling turns the Second Amendment into the “fugitive slave clause” of our time. Across American history, scholars often have called slavery “the Constitution’s biggest flaw.” A parallel flaw is now the dominant judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Slavery exists throughout the Constitution:
- Article 1, Section 9, prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves until 1808.
- Article 5 declared that Article 1, Section 5 could not be amended.
- Article 1, Section 2, established that, to calculate Congressional representation, Black slaves in each state would be counted as three-fifths that of white citizens in that state.
- Article 4, Section 2, mandated the “fugitive slave clause,” requiring escaped slaves to be returned to their owners. It reads: “A person charged in any state with treason, felony or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.”
“Spouses who seek freedom from abusive mates must live with the reality that restraining orders will not protect them from the guns their abusers are constitutionally permitted to carry.”
Because of that Constitutional article, slaves who found their way to freedom by escaping constitutionally permitted servitude were fair game for recapture and return to slavery. As of this month, spouses who seek freedom from abusive mates must live with the reality that restraining orders will not protect them from the guns their abusers are constitutionally permitted to carry. They are now constant fugitives. Abusers who use those guns against them will be arrested, of course, but not before their victims could be dead or wounded.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved on June 8, 1866, ended the fugitive slave clause and the other legal vestiges of chattel slavery. How long will the nation’s legislators and jurists continue to read that same Constitution in ways that recreate similar fugitive individuals to the mercy of the Second Amendment?
All are vulnerable
I write these words on St. Valentine’s Day, 2023, the fifth anniversary of the Parkland High School shooting and the day after three students at Michigan State University died in a campus shooting that left five others in critical condition. I have just watched as the attending physician and the interim president of Michigan State University fought back tears as they spoke about the event. Reports are that the campus lockdown instructed students and others to “run, hide, fight.”
Those are words for fugitives that apply to every American, for we are all vulnerable to the gun-god, anywhere, anytime.
Shannon Watts calls us to fight: “We don’t have to die like this. We don’t have to live like this.”
Yet right now, because we are living and dying like that, we may be forced to “run, hide, fight” just to stay alive. There have been 67 mass shootings so far this year, and that’s only the mass shootings. Firearm emancipation will be a long time coming, so we must fight for it and live with present gun realities. As Fred Guttenberg warns, another shooting “is just around the corner.”
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
Related articles:
Seeing gun violence as a pro-life issue | Opinion by Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin
Yes, there is a way out of our national gun violence epidemic | Opinion by Paul E. Robertson
In the gun violence debate, let’s stop scapegoating mental illness | Opinion by Curtis Ramsey-Lucas