In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to protect the right of an individual to possess a firearm, a panel of academicians convened on April 7 to discuss the appropriate measure of gun control in the United States.

The speakers included Peter Brooks, lecturer of Comparative Literature at Princeton University's Center for Human Values; James Jacobs, the Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts; and Nicholas Johnson, a Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Stanley Katz, a Professor of Public and International Affairs and Direct of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School moderated the panel.

Katz introduced the topic to the audience by framing the firearm debate as a problem of Constitutional interpretation.  He suggested that much of the discussion about guns in America revolves around the arguable existence of a right to firearms written into the Constitution.

“That more or less flows from the text of the Second Amendment,” Katz said.  “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of hundred years arguing about what the framers or those who passed the Bill of Rights had in mind when they framed that enigmatic and grammatically imperfect Amendment to the Constitution.”

Nicholas Johnson attributed this division to differences in culture, stating that the environment from which one views or approaches the gun issue predicts a great deal about the views one is willing to credit. “It seems to me that one’s got a different sense of what works, a different sense of the costs and benefits and utility of firearms depending on where one is sitting,” he said.

Yet the divisions do not end there, Johnson suggested, as he also pointed to differences in willingness to trust the government.  The question is, he said, whether one believes it is wise to trust the government. “We’re divided in terms of our views of the role of government,” he said.

But Johnson also warned against being too emotional to the issue and reacting, as he put it, “viscerally” to firearms. “I think we need to be self-conscious about how we come to our views on this question,” he said.  “I think there’s a possibility that we come to our views not on thinking but by feeling.”

James Jacobs, who also serves as the Direct of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University School of Law, addressed the possible policy approaches to the gun problem.
 “What is meant by gun control?” he asked the audience.  “What are the options given where we are now as a society with 300 million firearms in civilian hands?  Prohibition is not an option.”

Likening the idea of some kind of gun prohibition to fantasy, Jacobs stressed that a war on firearms as an approach to the gun problem should be taken off the table entirely.  He instead pointed to stronger implementation of existing policy to reduce firearm abuse. “I think that is going to be the basis of our gun control policy,” Jacobs said.  “Better enforcement, better apprehension, better targeted prosecutions, better sanctions, and longer sentences.  I think that’s about the best that we can do.”

In light of these recommendations, Jacobs expressed concern for the policy being currently implemented. “The thing that might be disturbing to those who think about gun control is that the policy is going dramatically in the opposite direction,” Jacobs said.  “So many states have passed laws saying that people have a presumptive right to a license, as long as they have no criminal record, to carry a concealed weapon.  That was passed in forty states, while the country slept, while the New York Times slept.”

In a more theoretical approach to the gun issue, Mellon Visiting Professor Peter Brooks considered different linguistic interpretations of the Second Amendment.  Grammatically deconstructing the Amendment, Brooks discussed the relationship between the document’s clauses, phrases, and words. “One of the enigmas here has always been the relation between the introductory phrase of the militia, to the right to keep and bear arms,” Brooks said.

Brooks also discussed Justice Scalia’s opinion in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, which protects the right of an individual to possess a firearm and, Brooks argued, overruled the district’s attempt to regulate a problem of urban crime.

Citing numerous Latin syntactical phrases and referencing several grammatical clause constructions, Brooks argued against Scalia’s linguistic and syntactical interpretation of the Second Amendment, an interpretation that centers upon self-defense. “He calls individual self-defense the central component of the right itself, to which I say, ‘Huh?’” Brooks remarked.  “This is pulling interpretations out of nothing.”

Brooks instead suggest the inherent right to self-defense as the central tenet of the Second Amendment.  Unlike Scalia’s interpretation, Brooks suggested that this right does not ultimately manifest itself through personal means, but rather through the law. “They’re seemingly close readings of text,” he noted in regards to Scalia’s opinion.  “They’re actually interpretations that claim to derive everything from the text, but have no real principles of doing so.”