Letter: Right to bear arms does not trump other rights

The right to vote is one of those unenumerated rights, as is the right to privacy, the right to marry, etc.

The 2nd Amendment because of profit and politics has over the last 40-50 years been adjudicated countering its original intent and now disparages our rights to live without fear of being a victim of gun violence.

The cost of gun violence can be measured in billions of dollars but how do you place a dollar sign on the loss of 40,000 lives each year. Just recently we learned we have spent $350,000 in Catawba County for metal detectors in our schools, an expenditure we had to make to reduce the risk of a school shooting.

There are enough firearms in our midst for every man, woman, and child but those firearms reside in 43% of households.

The 2nd Amendment’s enumerated right to bear arms was written out of a fear of standing armies and a powerful central government and based on knowledge and technology of the 1780s.

Had our Founders been able to see 200 years into the future, an amendment granting us the right to bear arms would have, in my opinion, been written with clarity that governments can control the who, what, when and where of gun ownership.

We are the only developed country in the world where a 250-year-old amendment to our Constitution is now being interpreted by conservative judges without due consideration for how their rulings impact other rights retained by the people.

If we are ever again able to live in a country where mass shootings and gun violence are the exception rather than the expected, we must reject the arguments that efforts to keep guns from those with proclivities for evil are a threat to our right to bear arms. We must restrict public ownership of weapons of war. We must define the limits of Justice Scalia’s words following the 2008 case, D.C. v. Heller: “The right to bear arms was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."

David Turman

Hickory