Guns and our failing Constitution

Once again, an American city has endured the horror of gun violence in an elementary school. In a quiet Nashville neighborhood, gunfire erupted on what should have been a typical school day. Six people were assassinated, including three nine-year-old children.

Once more, cable news devoted hours of coverage to the breaking news. And, once more, Congress will fail to act. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), admitted, “We’re not going to fix it.” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) mailed Christmas cards last year with his smiling family holding guns. Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Thomas Massie (R-W.Va.) did the same. And, with the exception of Boebert, all were easily reelected last year.

For a generation of children, practicing how to “run, hide and fight” has become a regular part of their school experience — something that will continue well into this century. Consider: A child born today will turn five in 2028. For the next 13 years, until 2041, that child will have a teacher lock the classroom door and herd his or her classmates into closets to prevent anyone from knowing they are there.

During the 1950s, Cold War kids were taught to “duck and cover” because the United States and Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to kill millions of people several times over. But the U.S. government did something about it. In 1963, President Kennedy entered into a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to stop atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing. Nine years later, President Nixon signed the SALT and ABM agreements. In 1987, President Reagan authorized a historic agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Working together, presidents and congresses responded to the public’s demand for a more peaceful, safer world, resulting in the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991.

Today, our government is paralyzed thanks to a failing Constitution. In the Senate, the near-universal use of the filibuster makes obtaining the 60 votes required to pass any legislation a virtual impossibility.

It wasn’t always this way. After the Constitution was written, the early Congresses required only majority votes to approve legislation. But in 1806, Vice President Aaron Burr, acting in his role as president of the Senate, ruled any motion to end debate and move to a final vote was an unnecessary duplication, thus creating the conditions under which filibusters could occur. Today, that ruling has made a mockery of the Senate’s reputation as the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has become a partisan cesspool, with most members concerned with satisfying their partisan base but unconcerned about winning general elections in their heavily gerrymandered districts. Like the filibuster, the gerrymander was an early invention by Elbridge Gerry who, as governor of Massachusetts, designed a congressional district in the shape of a salamander to favor the Democratic Party.

Our Constitution’s framers did not design a pure democracy, as historians will remind you, but a republic carefully crafted to deliberate issues yet ultimately responsive to its citizens. On guns, there is a consensus demanding action: 83 percent support background checks, 55 percent favor banning future sales of assault weapons and 75 percent want red flag laws that allow police to confiscate guns from anyone threatening themselves or others. The public outcry to “Do Something!” is greatest among Generation Z, whose lives have been forever altered by gun violence.

A Harvard Institute of Politics poll finds 63 percent of them want stricter gun control laws. Today, gun violence has replaced car accidents as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents. A constitutional republic should be able to respond to the near-universal call for action. But that is not happening. A frustrated President Biden said, “I can’t do anything except to plead with the Congress to act reasonably.”

In the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson published “Constitutional Government.” In it, he wrote: “A people not conscious of any unity. . .can manifestly neither form nor sustain a constitutional system. . . .They can form no common judgment; they can conceive of no common end; they can contrive no common measures. Nothing but a community can have a constitutional form of government, and if a nation has not become a community, it cannot have that sort of polity.” Today, we are hardly the united community needed to make the Constitution work.

The Constitution is failing, and the question is why? One answer is that this so-called “divinely inspired” document has been perverted into something the framers would hardly recognize. While the Second Amendment protects the rights of gun ownership, its defenders often forget its preface: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

The intent of the Second Amendment was not to arm ordinary citizens with weapons of war, but to avoid the need for a free-standing army, which the framers believed was a threat to liberty. Writing in “The Federalist Papers,” Alexander Hamilton called a well-regulated militia “the most natural defense of a free country.”

If we are failing the Constitution, then we are in danger of ending the experiment begun by the framers. In 1838, Abraham Lincoln said:“[I]f destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The continued political paralysis means a crisis is coming. Whether the country and the Constitution will weather it or die by suicide is an open question.

John Kenneth White is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. His latest book, co-authored with Matthew Kerbel, is “American Political Parties: Why They Formed, How They Function, and Where They’re Headed.” He can be reached at johnkennethwhite.com