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Coincidentally enough, that's precisely what Obama wants to do. But even if he didn't agree so strongly with the president about so many issues on gun policy, it was outrageous for LaPierre to reject the White House's invitation. As a free citizen he has every right not to meet with his nation's leader. But as the leader of a group aiming to influence public policy, he direspects the citizens of the United States by refusing to meet with their democratically elected representative.

In the case of Wisconsin labour relations, I thought the impasse between the two sides resulted from one side declaring political war. With guns, however, i believe the problem is mistrust. There is no doubt that some gun owners think Obama wants to ban their weapons. Gun sales surged in 2008 after he was elected President. As a result, though Obama says that he "believe[s] that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms" and acknowledges that "the courts have settled that as the law of the land," many gun rights advocates still feel the need to oppose any legislation aimed at making gun ownership safer. They fear any capitulation on their behalf will just lead to gun control advocates getting bolder in their attempts to make weapons harder to own.

This is and is not a legitimate fear. Yes, gun control advocates have long wanted to put in place laws gun owners feel are excessively onerous. But gun rights activists have beaten those back, and then some. The Supreme Court has acknowledged an individual right to bear arms, and Congress has refused to put back in place a ban on semi-automatic weapons, even after one nearly claimed the life of one the institution's own members. Serious efforts at gun control gain little traction in American politics today, and Obama's column reflected that. Indeed, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne criticized Obama for being too conciliatory to the NRA. It's time for the NRA and its sympathisers to relax and not assume every Democrat is out to confiscate their guns.

This is an ideal place for Washington to arrive at a consensus. Both gun control and gun rights activists should be happy to ensure that guns are kept in the hands of the sensible and law-abiding, and that there aren't ways for the unscrupulous to get around those restrictions — such as by heading to a gun show to skip the mandatory background check. In his column, the President wrote:

I know that every time we try to talk about guns, it can reinforce stark divides. People shout at one another, which makes it impossible to listen. We mire ourselves in stalemate, which makes it impossible to get to where we need to go as a country.

True. And there'll be plenty of time to carry on doing that once both sides have worked to put in place the measures they all agree on.

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But, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court decided that I was wrong, and that Americans do have some right to own weapons for the purpose of self-defence. It's a right that is currently protected only against Federal-not state-interverntion and that must be balanced against the state's interest in protecting its citizens (which is why you won't see any D.C. residents buying nukes in the near future), but it is a right nonetheless.

So, given the current state of affairs, it's very difficult for a liberal to argue that things like the 1st Amendment or the 8th Amendment extend to the States, by virtue of the 14th Amendments equal protection clause, but somehow pretend the 2nd Amerndment does not. Indeed, the liberal touchstone of Roe v Wade hinges, in part, on the 14th Amendments equal protection requirement, as does the famed New York Times v Sullivan case, which prevented the Alabama courts from finding an anti-segregationist advertisement to be libelous. If states must respect a right to freedom of religion and trial by jury, why shouldn't they have to respect a right to self-defence? If we want to claim that the 2nd Amendment refers to Militia, that is, state-based organisations, how can we claim that this is one of the few Constitutional prescriptions that does not extend the "privileges and immunities" to citizens of the states?

It's a quandary Ben Adler discusses over at Newsweek:

What is going on here? For much of the nation's history, [founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Douglas] Kendall and his supporters argue, the right to bear arms was considered essential to citizenship. "Forty-two states in their state constitutions provide protections for the right to bear arms," says [UCLA law professor Adam] Winkler. "It is one of the longest-standing, most deeply entrenched rights in American history."

At the heart of the left-leaning dissenters' argument is a plea for consistency. For decades, liberals have insisted that the Constitution assumes—even if it does not explicitly spell out—a right to bodily autonomy. This right, long disputed by conservatives, is a basis for arguments in favor of abortion rights and gay rights. Liberals who support gun rights find a similar implied right to own weapons: after all, they say, what is the right to bear arms but the ability to protect your body from criminals as well as the government? "The right to bear arms gives you a mechanism to protect your bodily autonomy from attack," says Winkler.

The notion that the 2nd Amendment protects bodily autonomy is where I part ways with these scholars. It is true that defenders of the right to bear arms see it as a defence against government intervention in two ways; first, that it enables the people to rebel against a corrupt government, and second, that it frees a citizen from having to rely on government for his^[1] protection against criminals, rapists and murderers^[2]. But it simply does not follow that a right to keep and bear arms facilitates either of these interpretations of bodily autonomy. Owning a gun, in practice, does very little to protect a citizen from a criminal who has the element of surprise, strength, and determination, and it does little to actually protect citizens from bodily harm. All it does, rather, is escalate situations with some possibility for violence into a much more volatile circumstance ruled by right-by-might and no more certainty that the victim will be protected.

And given the state of the American-or indeed, other nation's-armed forces, the idea that a handgun could facilitate a citizen response to tyranny is laughable. Either the 2nd Amendment must protect a right to own tanks and stealth bombers (or at least machine guns and I.E.D.s), or it cannot practicably be considered a means by which individual citizens can keep their government in check.

But that doesn't mean the Court should not rule in favour of increased gun rights in McDonald. If D.C. residents have a right to keep and bear some arms for their own self-defence, so too should citizens in the rest of the United States. I would hope, though, that the Court would maintain a situation that allows hunters in West Virginia and Arizona to carry all the guns they like, while residents of Chicago and New York remain protected against those of their neighbours who would use arms for offensive, rather than defensive purposes. 

^[1] It's usually a he.

^[2] I think this is something tough for Australians to understand, because we like relying on government for protection against those kinds of people.

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See, according to well-established precedent, there was no clearly defined individual right to bear arms in the United States. That's because the Second Amendment reads, "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." It's a poorly constructed, barely sensical sentence that rendered the country unable to definitively decide whether individuals could keep arms for the purpose of self-defence, or merely as part of a "well regulated Militia." The 1939 decision of United States v Miller, for instance, did little to clarify matters, finding that a sawn-off shotgun wasn't protected because it wasn't common military equipment. That is, the notion that it could be kept for individual self-defence was not broached.

That was dramatically changed in 2008, when the Court ruled in District of Columbia v Heller that Dick Heller, a police officer, could not be denied his right to keep a handgun in his D.C. home for self defence. The majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia, and it was the first time the Court had found a definitive individual right to keep and bear arms. For the first time, the United States was the crazy gun haven the rest of the world imagined it to be.

Or, no, actually it wasn't. The Heller decision, despite its sweeping overturn of precedent, was very limited in scope. It permitted bans on guns in places like schools and federal buildings. It permitted bans on criminals and mentally ill people carrying guns. And since the District of Columbia is regulated by the Federal Government, it had nothing to say about whether states or cities could maintain bans on guns. All the ruling really said was that a D.C. resident had to somehow be allowed to keep some sort of gun in his or her residence if they wanted to badly enough. Trust me: sitting where I am in Arlington, Virginia right now, it's going to be much easier for my next door neighbour to buy and carry a gun than it would be if he tried to do the same on the other side of the Potomac River.

The case the Court is looking at right now, McDonald v Chicago, is the one the Post says will cause Scalia such consternation, and that's because the plaintiff here seeks to, via the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on "State[s] mak[ing] or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," apply the Second Amendment's prohibition on Federal gun bans to the States. The Fourteenth Amendment has previously been used to require states to recognize rights to abortion, free speech, trial by jury, and not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia has a record of being none-too-happy with this notion that the Fourteenth Amendment applied the Bill of Rights protections to the States, though he has a similarly consistent record of being quite happy with individual citizens owning guns for reasons that have nothing to do with maintaining a militia. Here, he must choose between hypocrisy and doctrinal consistency. My guess is that he'll side with the former. But until the Court reaches its decision on this case, it's useful to remember that in most places in the U.S. people can own guns because the population around them thinks its OK for them to own guns. Not because of something Thomas Jefferson scribbled down a couple centuries ago.

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