Sticks, Stones, Words, and Guns

The classic expression "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" is meant to teach children that they cannot be hurt ... at least, physically ... by unpleasant things that are said to or about them. Unfortunately, words can hurt us, in many different ways.

There are a lot of ways to look at this, but the one that got me off on this tangent was consideration of the gun violence crisis in America. The importance of language in the context of this discussion is evident from one simple example: use of the term assault rifle to describe a civilian firearm derived from a military weapon and retaining various military characteristics. Firearms advocates believe persons using this term are ignorant and cannot be taken seriously in debate because there's no such precisely-defined thing as an assault rifle. To gun safety advocates, on the other hand, this insistence on linguistic purity obscures legitimate concern over the dangers posed by high-powered semiautomatic weapons, whatever they're called, in ordinary society.

While preparing this post, I spent some time reading the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the famous case of District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down the DC ban on ownership and storage of handguns. The original DC law was intended to help reduce gun violence on the streets of the nation's capitol, but it was opposed by those who believed they needed guns to protect themselves from other people with guns. When the case reached the Supreme Court and was finally decided, the 157-page decision (including dissents) was loaded not only with the usual dense legal analysis but, oddly enough, dense semantic analysis. The justices devoted page after page to parsing the exact meaning of the individual words of the Second Amendment - militia, state, keep, bear, keep and bear, arms, and people - as they were understood in 1789. Such linguistic exactitude is important to those who believe the Constitution means only and exactly what those who wrote it meant in the 18th century. 

Of course, 2021 is a bit removed from 1789, and the technology and power of weapons commonly available to the average citizen is quite a bit different. The justices halfheartedly acknowledged this when they wrote 

"It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks ..."

Nevertheless, the words of the Second Amendment have been construed by the 21st century Supreme Court to mean the exact same thing they would have meant to a citizen of the 18th century.

The Court also wrote (somewhat disingenuously, in my opinion), in the Heller decision, 

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by

felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of fire arms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those 'in common use at the time' finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."

And we enter the realm of semantics once again, as lawyers buy big houses, cars, and yachts on their earnings from the endless parsing of phrases like common use and dangerous and unusual. Is an AR-15 dangerous and unusual? Dangerous? Absolutely. Unusual? As a weapon designed to provide maximum personal firepower on the battlefield, not at all; for personal protection at the local Starbucks, perhaps. Is it in common use? It certainly is, although one might reasonably ask whether it ought to be in common use on America's streets rather than wartime battlefields.

Want to spend more time down the rabbit hole of Second Amendment semantics? One of the references cited by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision is a study by attorney Stephen Halbrook titled What the Framers Intended: A Linguistic Analysis of the Right to "Bear Arms." Although the document is fairly short (only 12 pages, including 78 footnotes), it addresses in succinct but comprehensive detail the historical meaning of the key terms contained in the Second Amendment, and concludes that

"The framers of the second and fourteenth amendments intended to guarantee an individual right to carry firearms and other common hand-carried arms."

And there's that sneaky word common again. Time to deploy the reinforced platoons of lawyers to breach the ramparts of its intended meaning.

So, my bottom line is ...

Words can, in fact, hurt you. Not by themselves, but by the passions they release and the weapons they are used to justify. Be careful how you use them.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo