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31 T. M. Cooley L. Rev. 15 (2014)
A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment

handle is hein.journals/tmclr31 and id is 33 raw text is: A LIBERAL'S CASE FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT CRAIG R. WHITNEY* ABSTRACT Gun violence takes about 30,000 lives a year in the United States, two thirds of them suicides. Does the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, protecting the right to keep and bear arms, rule out gun-control measures aimed at improving public safety? History shows that it was originally designed to reassure Americans who feared that the new federal government could become tyrannical if it maintained a standing army. It was intended to guarantee that the volunteer militias of the states could continue to be a deterrent to such federal tyranny. The common-law individual right to have and use firearms had always been regulated by states and localities in colonial days, and their gun controls continued after independence, even in the Wild West. Federal gun regulations came only much later. They were generally accepted until recent decades, when powerful lobbies like the National Rifle Association (NRA) started fighting almost all attempts to balance gun rights with public safety, denouncing them as stealth efforts to deprive all Americans of a fundamental constitutional right. A series of mass shootings then led to a federal ban on semi-automatic assault rifles that expired in 2004. Proposals to renew the ban and pass new federal controls emerged after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut at the end of 2012, but all of them failed to overcome opposition in the Senate the following April. . Craig R. Whitney, A.B., magna cum laude, Harvard College (1965). The author is a Vietnam War Navy veteran and a retired foreign correspondent and editor of The New York Times who worked in Vietnam, Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, New York, and Washington, D.C. over a 44-year career. His books include The WMD Mirage, a collection of documents about the mistaken intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that led the United States to go to war there, and Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment, both published by PublicAffairs. This Article arose from a symposium held at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in October, 2013. Mr. Whitney wishes to thank Stephen Madej, the Symposium Editor of the Law Review, and its staff for their diligent editing help, particularly Kathryn Frontier, Editor-in-Chief; Stephanie Strycharz, Articles Editor, and Jacqueline Langwith, Solicitation Editor.

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