CONCEALED-CARRY CONFUSION

Craig R. Whitney

Mass shooting follows mass shooting, year after year. Just since mid-May, shooters have used legally purchased military-style semi-automatic rifles to kill scores and leave dozens gravely injured: in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; and now Highland Park, Illinois. On top of atrocities like those, pistols and other handguns in private hands now kill more than 45,000 of us annually.

Yet our Supreme Court’s conservative Republican majority tells us that gun control measures that limit our ability to carry concealed weapons in public are unconstitutional.

The Court did this on June 23 by striking down New York State gun regulations that required applicants who wanted concealed-carry permits for self-defense to show that they’d been specifically targeted.

Self-defense, Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority decision said, was the “central component” of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which recognizes and protects our right to keep and bear arms. So the law requiring New Yorkers to show that they had a special need to carry arms to protect themselves had to go.

Never mind that the Second Amendment does not even mention self-defense. What it clearly says is that the right of the people to be armed is an essential underpinning of a free state.

New York’s Democratic-controlled state legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul reacted to the Court’s decision with lightning speed only days after the ruling. The state enacted new regulations that spelled out a multiplicity of even more requirements New Yorkers will need to satisfy to qualify for concealed-carry permits — gun training courses, character references, proof of clean criminal records, on and on. And the law defines so many places where carrying guns will not be allowed even with permits — including schools, churches, hospitals and clinics, all public transportation vehicles, polling places, courthouses, private businesses and stores unless they explicitly permit it, and ALL of Times Square — that many people may decide applying isn’t worth the trouble.

It’s a cinch that the NRA and other gun-rights advocates will challenge this new law. Would the Supreme Court approve it?

Not if the backward logic of the first decision still prevails. Justice Samuel Alito, concurring with Justice Thomas in that ruling, wrote that “the ubiquity of guns and our country’s high level of gun violence…cause law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense.” Ergo, they should be able to do that.

But more guns in citizens’ hands does not mean more safety from assault on the streets. Year by year, Americans have been buying more and more guns– with about 400 million in people’s hands today — and more and more Americans are being killed by guns. As of early July, there have been around 300 mass shootings so far this year alone, a rate that may bring the total past last year’s record 692. Handguns cause most of the country’s firearms deaths — 45,222 people were shot to death in 2020, more than half of them, 24, 292, in suicides. A decade and a half ago, in 2007, guns killed 29,984, including 17,352 suicides.

The logic of many gun-control measures is also faulty. Weapons are always dangerous, but most dangerous when they are in the wrong hands. Trying to keep guns out of the hands of most people has often seemed to be the hidden goal of a lot of restrictions. Keeping guns out of the wrong hands is an eminently justifiable goal. But too often, even regulations aimed at doing that are not effective.

Consider the Buffalo shooting on May 14. An 18-year-old white supremacist, Payton S. Gendron, in body armor and a helmet, assassinated 10 Black people at a supermarket with a Bushmaster XM-15 military-style semiautomatic rifle. He was able to pass the background check and had no trouble buying it from a dealer, legally. Yet he had had a psychiatric examination a year earlier after telling a teacher in his hometown that he was thinking about committing murder, and suicide. She reported it, but law-enforcement authorities were not asked to investigate. If they had, he might not have been able to buy the murder weapon.

The Uvalde shooting in Texas, May 24. Another disturbed 18-year-old, Salvador Ramos, broke into Robb Elementary School with an AR-15 style semiautomatic that he had legally purchased online. Some people who met him through social media told police later that he had talked a lot about shooting and killing, but they didn’t think he was serious and didn’t report it. The school’s armed police guards, wary of hurting or killing fleeing students, held off shooting him before he got inside and then waited more than an hour before going in. Before they killed him, he had killed 19 students and 2 teachers.

The Highland Park, Ill. shooting, July 4. Robert E. Crimo III, 21 years old, climbed to a rooftop and shot to death seven people enjoying the town’s Independence Day parade on the sidewalks below, wounding more than three dozen others as well. Though in 2019 the Highland Park police had responded to reports from some of his relatives that he was threatening to “kill everyone,” and seized 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from his home, his father said the weapons belonged to him, not his son. The local police reported this, plus the young man’s explanation that he had been depressed and used drugs, to the State Police. They decided that there was insufficient evidence to show he posed a “clear and present danger.” If they had concluded that he did, he would not have been able, three months later, to apply for an identification card required to purchase guns. He was still under 21, and with his father’s sponsorship, he was able to pass four background checks and buy, among other weapons, the deadly Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle the police say he used in the parade massacre.

After the first two of these recent massacres, and after years and years of deadlock, a narrow majority of members of Congress, all Democrats plus a few Republicans as well, passed a new law at the end of June to try to close some of the loopholes in Federal gun laws that had not kept tragedies like these from happening.

The new measure strengthens background checks for gun purchases from licensed dealers and will allow examination of juvenile mental health records from age 16 that were previously off-limits.

It will also provide Federal funding to encourage states to create “red flag laws,” which allow authorities to take guns away temporarily from people found by a judge to be potentially dangerous. Illinois already has these laws, but none of the Crimo family members or friends ever referred the young man’s threats to authorities.

The new law, for the first time, will allow Federal authorities to crack down on straw purchasers — people who buy guns legally and then sell them or give them knowingly to criminals or others barred from purchasing themselves. The law would treat such transactions as crimes, with penalties of 15 to 25 years in prison for people proven to have provided guns that turn up in the street shootings and other serious crimes that wrack so many inner-city neighborhoods every weekend.

It’s a start. But there’s such a long way to go. We need to keep thinking, hard. More rigorously than the Supreme Court did.

Craig R. Whitney is the author of Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012)