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75 B.U. L. Rev. 57 (1995)
Gun Crazy: Constitutional False Consciousness and Dereliction of Dialogic Responsibility

handle is hein.journals/bulr75 and id is 71 raw text is: GUN CRAZY: CONSTITUTIONAL FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS AND DERELICTION OF DIALOGIC RESPONSIBILITY ANDREw D. HERZ* A powerful lobby dins into the ears of our citizenry that these gun purchases are constitutional rights protected by the Second Amend- ment.... Our decisions belie that argument, for the Second Amend- ment was designed to keep alive the militia. -Justice William 0. Douglas' INTRODUCTION This is an Article about the causes and costs of false consciousness- false consciousness regarding the constitutional concept of the right to bear arms. This is an Article about the deceit, misperception, and dere- liction of responsibility that have characterized America's dysfunctional gun control debate. My focus is on the claim that every proposed regulation of firearms necessarily implicates the Second Amendment. The gun lobby2 has suc- * Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. J.D., Cornell Law School; B.A., University of Virginia. Carl Bogus, Louise Harmon, Berta Esperanza Hernandez, Beryl Jones, Holly Maguigan, Twila Perry, Deborah Waire Post, Dan Subotnik, and (especially) David C. Williams provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts. Mitch Berman, Mary Milone, Stacey Schwartz, John Smargiassi, and Daphna Zekaria came through with consistently excellent research assistance. This Article could never have happened if my wife, Maureen Padgett, were not a woman of supreme patience and tolerance. The Article is dedicated to Hank, and to everybody else's kids. None of them should have to grow up in the dark shadow of so many guns. 1 Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S 143, 150-51 (1972) (Douglas, J., dissenting). 2 References throughout to the gun lobby and gun-rights advocates apply not to individual gun owners or National Rifle Association (NRA) members, but solely to gun-rights litigators and leaders of the NRA and other gun-rights organizations. Many gun owners do not share the extreme views of the NRA. The hard-line views of the NRA are crafted not from the majority of gun-owners, or even its members, but from its leadership and an activist core of 600,000 members. JOSH SUGARMANN, NRA: MONEY, FIREPOWER AND FEAR 17 (1992). The overwhelming majority of gun owners are responsible, law-abiding men and women. They have many different rea- sons for wanting to own and use firearms: Americans own guns for manifold reasons. Hunters... view their guns as a way to escape the 'stoplight-and-concrete-jungle.' Target shooters emphasize the 57

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