Repeal Second Amendment and save lives
                        By George Will
                        
Two staggering facts about today's America are the carnage that is a
consequence of virtually uncontrolled private ownership of guns and
Americas' toleration of that carnage.

Class, not racial, bias explains the toleration of scandals such as
this: More teen-age males die from gunfire than from all natural
causes combined, and a black male teenager is 11 times more likely
than a white to be killed by a bullet. If sons of the confident,
assertive, articulate middle class, regardless of race, were dying
in such epidemic numbers, gun control would be considered a national
imperative.

But another reason Americans live with a gun policy that is demonstratively
disastrous is that the subject was constitutionalized 200 years ago
this year in the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people
to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Many gun control advocates argue that the unique 13-word preample 
stipulates the Amendment's purpose in a way that severely narrows
constitutional protection of gun ownership. They say the Amendment
obviously provides no protection of individuals' gun ownership for
private purposes. They say it only provides an anachronistic protection
of states' rights to maintain militias.

However, Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas Law School
says that is far from obvious. In a Yale Law Journal article, "The
Embarrassing Second Amendment," he makes an argument that is
dismaying to those, like me, who favor both strict gun control and
strict construction of the Constitution. He begins with some historical
philology showing that the 18th century meaning of "militia" makes even
the amendment's preamble problematic.

He notes that if the Founders wanted only to protect states' rights
to maintain militias, they could have said simply, "Congress shall
have no power to prohibit state militias."

The Second Amendment is second only to the First Amendment's protections
of free speech, religion and assembly, because, Levinson argues, the
Second Amendment is integral to America's anti-statist theory of
republican government. That theory says that free individuals must
be independent of coercion, and such independence depends in part on
freedom from the meance of standing armies and government monopoly
on the means of force.

In a most important Supreme Court case concerning Congress' right to
regulate private gun ownership, upholding the conviction of a man who
failed to register his sawed-off shotgun, stressed the irrelevance
of that weapon to a well-regulated militia. Gun control advocates argue
that this lends no support to a constitutional right to ownership for
private purposes.

But Levinson notes that the court's ruling, far from weakening the Second
Amendment as a control on Congress, can be read as supporting
extreme anti-gun control arguments defending the right to own weapons,
such as assault rifles, that are relevant to modern warfare.

The foremost Founder, Madison, stressed (in Federalist Paper 46)
"the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the
people of almost every other nation." So central was the Second Amendment
to the understanding of America's political order, Justice Taney
in the Dred Scott decision said: Proof that blacks could not be citizens
is the fact that surely the Founders did not imagine them having the
right to possess arms.

The subject of gun control reveals a role reversal between liberals and
conservatives that makes both sides seem tendentious. Liberals, who usually
argue that constitutional rights must be respected regardless of 
inconvenient social consequences, say the Second Amendment right is too
costly to honor. Conservatives who frequently favor applying cost-benefit
analyses to constitutional construction advocate an absolutist 
construction of the Second Amendment.

The Bill of Rights should be modified only with extreme reluctance but
America has an extreme crisis of gunfire. And impatience to deal with
it can cause less than scrupulous readings in the Constitution.

Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it
was 200 years ago, when the requirements of self-defense and food-
gathering made gun ownership almost universal. But whatever the right
is, there it is.

The National Rifle Association is perhaps correct and certainly is
plausible in its "strong" reading of the Second Amendment protection
of private gun ownership. Therefore gun control advocates who want
to square their policy preferences with the Constitution should squarely
face the need to deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the
embarrassing amendment.