Each year in the United States, approximately 30,000 people, or 80 per day,
die from gun violence. True, guns do not kill people; people kill people. In the
United States, however, people kill people by using guns. The murder rate in
America is 15 times higher than in other first-world countries; the majority of
these murders are committed with guns. As for the notion that guns are necessary
in order to defend oneself from an intruder with a gun: One study of three U.S.
cities revealed that injuries involving guns kept at home almost always resulted
from accidental firings, criminal assaults, homicides and suicides by the
residents, not self-defense scenarios. In October the American Academy of
Pediatrics reminded us, “The safest home for children and teens is one without
guns.”
The facts, however, do not appear to shake a deeply held American belief in
the near-unconditional use of force as a means to an end. The culture of
violence in America has spawned a deadly syllogism: Guns solve problems; we have
problems; therefore, we need guns. Yet consider the tragedy in Aurora. Imagine
if just 10 other people in that movie theater had been carrying guns. In the
confusion of the onslaught, would fewer people or more people have died when
those 10 other people opened fire in the dark? More important, is this really
the kind of world we want to live in, a world in which lethal power can be
unleashed at any moment at any corner, in any home, in any school?
We do not have to live in such a world. Both Australia and Britain, for
example, experienced gun massacres in 1996 and subsequently enacted stricter gun
control laws. Their murder rates dropped. Yet in the United States, the
birthplace of pragmatism, our fundamental law proscribes practical, potentially
life-saving measures.
Americans must ask: Is it prudent to retain a constitutionally guaranteed
right to bear arms when it compels our judges to strike down reasonable,
popularly supported gun regulations? Is it moral to inhibit in this way the
power of the country’s elected representatives to provide for the public safety?
Does the threat of tyranny, a legitimate 18th-century concern but an
increasingly remote, fanciful possibility in the contemporary United States,
trump the grisly, daily reality of gun violence? The answer to each of these
questions is no. It is time to face reality. If the American people are to
confront this scourge in any meaningful way, then they must change. The
Constitution must change. The American people should repeal the Second
Amendment.
We acknowledge the gravity of our proposal. The Bill of Rights enumerates our
most cherished freedoms. Any proposal to change the nation’s fundamental law is
a very serious matter. We do not propose this course of action in a desultory
manner, nor for light or transient reasons. We also acknowledge that repeal
faces serious, substantial political obstacles and will prove deeply unpopular
with many Americans. Nevertheless, we believe that repeal is necessary and that
it is worthy of serious consideration.
Our proposal is in keeping, moreover, with the spirit in which the
Constitution was drafted. The Bill of Rights belongs to a document that was
designed to be changed; indeed, it was part of the genius of our founders to
allow for a process of amendment. The process is appropriately cumbersome, but
it is not impossible. Since its adoption in 1787, the American people have
chosen to amend the Constitution 27 times. A century ago, leaders like Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson raised serious questions about the Constitution.
Amendments soon followed, including provisions for a federal income tax, the
direct election of U.S. senators, women’s suffrage and the prohibition of
alcohol. The 21st Amendment, which repealed prohibition, established the
precedent for our proposal.
Yet that kind of thoughtful, critical engagement with our fundamental law,
the kind of spirited debate that characterized early 20th-century America, is
not evident in contemporary American discourse. In the national imagination, the
Constitution is too often thought of as a kind of sacred text. Yet neither our
founders nor our forebears held to that view. The Constitution is mere human
law. It is excellent law, but it is not divine law; it is not revelation. We
should be wary of amending the Bill of Rights. We should also be wary of
idolizing it. The Constitution is the man-made law of a self-governing people;
the people, therefore, are entitled to ask basic, critical questions about it.
In our time, is a given constitutional provision a good law or a bad law? Does
it promote the common good? The secular dogma of constitutional immutability
must yield to careful, critical inquiry.
In the most comprehensive statement on gun violence to come from the U.S.
bishops’ conference, in 1975, a committee identified “the easy availability of
handguns in our society” as a major threat to human life and called for
“effective and courageous action to control handguns, leading to their eventual
elimination from our society” with “exceptions…for the police, military,
security guards” and sporting clubs. While this course of action, as the
District of Columbia discovered, is constitutionally proscribed, reasonable
restrictions on handguns are morally licit in the Catholic tradition. Indeed, we
may have a moral duty to enact such laws.
In a recent interview, Tommaso Di Ruzza, the expert on disarmament and arms
control at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, explained that an
individual does not possess an absolute natural right to own a lethal weapon:
“There is a sort of natural right to defend the common interest and the common
good” by the limited use of force, but this applies more to nations with an
effective rule of law, not armed individuals. In the wake of Newtown, Cardinal
Timothy M. Dolan said that “the fight for greater gun control in the country” is
a pro-life position. “The unfettered access to assault weapons and handguns,
along with the glorification of violence in our ‘entertainment’ industry…is
really all part of a culture of death,” Cardinal Dolan said.
Repealing the Second Amendment will not create a culture of life in one
stroke. Stricter gun laws will not create a world free of violence, in which gun
tragedies never occur. We cannot repeal original sin. Though we cannot create an
absolutely safe world, we can create a safer world. This does not require an
absolute ban on firearms. In the post-repeal world that we envision, some people
will possess guns: hunters and sportsmen, law enforcement officers, the
military, those who require firearms for morally reasonable purposes. Make no
mistake, however: The world we envision is a world with far fewer guns, a world
in which no one has a right to own one. Some people, though far fewer, will
still die from gun violence. The disturbing feeling that we have failed to do
everything in our power to remove the material cause of their deaths, however,
will no longer compound our grief.
The Supreme Court has ruled that whatever the human costs involved, the
Second Amendment “necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.” The
justices are right. But the human cost is intolerable. Repeal the Second
Amendment.
But does anyone really believe that those 18th century authors, who wrote that amendment, had in mind what we live with now, because of the proliferation of guns? Guns kill innocent people. If it's important to you right wing extremists to protect unborn lives, then start agitating to protect children who are already here. 
