One, Two

Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives.
Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick, The Second Amendment Has Become a Threat to the First, The Atlantic. Wednesday 27 October, 2021

"Many Americans," it seems, don't understand what the Bill of Rights was actually about. One can argue with the intent of the Bill of Rights, and, for that matter, with the intent of the Constitution of the United States as a whole. And one can certainly argue with their efficacy in practice. As much as many Conservative Americans have a sense that the Constitution made the United States into a uniquely free and fair society from the moment the last quill left the parchment, there's a valid counter-argument, and one with plenty of support in the historical record, that it was at least 190 years before the lofty ideals laid out were seriously enacted.

But back to the opening quote, which is the beginning of the cited article. The First Amendment does not create a absolute privilege to practice a religion, speak freely or petition the government free of any potential consequences. It simply says that governments, whether they be at the federal, state or local level, may not criminalize or otherwise punish such behavior. If an ill-tempered next-door neighbor takes exception to someone's choice of words and starts a fistfight, that's not a violation of the Constitution. It's simply assault and battery. Now, if a government decides that it will decline to prosecute assaults on its critics, with an eye on allowing ordinary citizens to do what it cannot, that would be problematic. (And this is why the Texas abortion law has been making a number of people worried, regardless of their stands on abortion rights.) But the First Amendment does not require governments to treat threats of violence made with the aim of silencing people more seriously than it treats other threats of violence.

Likewise, the Second Amendment is not a blanket license to walk around with a weapon wherever one pleases. If a property owner, including government property owners, says that weapons are not allowed on the premises, then they are not allowed on the premises. Again, no Constitutional right has been violated. Whether or not a government may effectively declare ownership of any and all public spaces within its jurisdiction, and effectively criminalize bearing arms in those spaces may be a matter of debate, but it's also a slightly different question. There are people who believe that the right to keep and bear arms should be limited only to the home, and the reasoning behind that is easy to understand. But so is reasoning that says that people were intended to be allowed to bear weapons more broadly.

Part of the problem with the idea that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights represent the best ideals of humanity (outside of the fact that such a claim certainly leaves room for debate) is the sense that no trade-offs were involved. But personally, I find it rather difficult to believe that the people who wrote the documents didn't consider that someone might use the processes and freedoms listed within to bad ends. It also seems unlikely that someone would believe that granting the general public the right to keep and bear arms would never result in someone being injured or killed inappropriately. And the common argument that people during the founding of the nation didn't envision military weapons in the hands of civilians sort of falls flat. A well-made musket of the time was basically a military-grade weapon, and many members of the Continental Army had brought their own weapons. This practice continued even up to the Civil War, when the Union and the Confederacy alike had too few weapons to equip all of the troops they had recruited.

But that's beside the point of this posting. Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick lay out beliefs about the Constitution that, even if "many Americans" think are true, are not the way the document actually works. As concerns free speech advocates, the problem is not the Second Amendment, but the age-old difficulty that arises in judging when someone intends to threaten another person. There is a mindset in the United States that associates violence with guns, because that's what tends to attract the media coverage. And while guns are a weapon of choice for a large number of violent encounters, they aren't the only choice. Just the rate for stabbings alone in the United States is about half of the entire homicide rate for the United Kingdom. At some point, the idea that violence is a good way of solving problems is going to have to be dealt with. And I don't think the Constitution will be much help there, even if people have come to understand what it says.