Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that schools could ban guns on their premises, at least until the legislature makes a law saying they aren’t allowed to do so.
That set off outrage among so-called Second Amendment supporters, including Chief Justice Stephen Markman, who this time was outvoted. In a dissent, he noted that Michigan law allows holders of a Concealed Pistol License to take their weapons anywhere.
Markman said that meant schools couldn’t outlaw guns, and added “and the opinion could end here.” But the Michigan chief justice may have forgotten something.
Nobody will, indeed, little note or long remember his dissent. But they will remember these ringing words from one of the most famous U.S. Supreme Court rulings in modern times:
“Nothing in our opinion should 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 firearms in sensitive places such as schools or government buildings.”
Bingo. Schools can outlaw guns. Now, if you suppose those words were those of by some liberal justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you’d be totally wrong. They were, in fact, by the most feared conservative on the court, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and are from his majority opinion in the District of Columbia v Heller, the landmark case that ten years ago established that an individual did in fact have the right to possess a handgun for traditionally lawful purposes.
By the way, until that ruling, which was an extremely narrow, 5 to 4 decision, legal opinion was sharply divided as to what the Second Amendment meant. Many scholars believed it meant only that the states had the right to form militias, a forerunner of the National Guard.
The full sentence, after all, 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.”
The Heller case was the first time the Supreme Court ever expressly said citizens had a constitutional right to bear arms. And in his majority opinion, Scalia emphasized that this right was not unlimited, that it “was not a right to keep and carry any weapon in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
Additionally, Scalia, in an opinion signed by four other justices, indicated that the right to bear arms extended only to weapons “in common use at the time,” which appears to suggest that assault weapons and machine guns can be banned.
Nobody would call Scalia a left-winger. But sadly, common sense may have been a bit more common in 2008 than now. Guns don’t belong in schools, period. The fantasy of armed teachers coolly dispatching a would-be school shooter would be great stuff for a Clint Eastwood movie. The reality is far likelier to be a scenario where the teacher accidently leaves the gun somewhere eight-year-old Lizzie can get it, and tragedy follows.
We have too many guns – more than one per person — and too few restrictions. There were more than 33,000 gun-related deaths in the United States last year. Japan, which has a third of our population, had about ten gun-related deaths total.
We already have enough gun-related mayhem, and we will have more. We should be thankful that for a moment, the Michigan Supreme Court struck a wee note of common sense.
