1A vs 2A: It’s Time to Pick a Side
The First Amendment and the Second Amendment have become mutually exclusive. The First Amendment guarantees us our rights of personal expression: intellectual and emotional exchange, religious worship, our free press, etc. But for an emboldened minority, the wielding of guns has become expression itself. Unfettered access to firearms denies all of us the true freedoms this country is supposedly premised on — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“For American children, the Second Amendment is a plague unlike any other.”
I spent three years at the Yale School of Drama and twenty years as a professional artist and teacher of acting — all of that time dedicated to the study of expression and the emotional forces that drive human behavior. I recognize emotional expression when I see it. And it is clear that to many Americans, guns have become another tool of emotional expression.
But don’t take my word for it. Ask the man who recently shot and killed a sandwich store employee for using “too much mayo”. Or the father who shot his 13-year-old son for misbehaving. Or the man who was upset about grass clippings on his car, so he shot and killed a lawn maintenance worker. Or the man who drew a gun on two women who didn’t thank him properly for holding the door for them. Ask the corrections officer who was sprayed with water from a water gun on a hot summer day and responded by pulling out his handgun and shooting an 18-year-old boy in the head, killing him.
This is conflict resolution in Second Amendment America.
For those wary that the plural of anecdote is not data, note the annual uptick in road rage shootings. More and more people are being threatened or shot because armed drivers feel sudden emotions and use weapons to express them. Additionally, Harvard University found that the simple act of carrying a gun makes a motorist more likely to act aggressively in the first place, which leads to more direct confrontation, which leads to more Second Amendment remedies.
“Guns do not express ideas, they amplify aggression. Guns do not encourage exchange, they enforce obedience.”
Gun manufacturers spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to convince men that guns are tools for expressing their feelings of anger, hurt, or fear. The higher their profits, the more dire our consequences. Seventy American women are shot and killed by their domestic partners every month, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. According to another study, American women are shot to death 21 times more often than women in other high-income countries, and in that group the United States accounts for 97% of all children ages 0–4 who are killed by guns. For American children, the Second Amendment is a plague unlike any other as more now die of gunshots than any other cause. Families who lost children in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre sued that gun’s manufacturer for marketing to disaffected young men with ads promising to make their enemies “bow down”. Weapon makers advertise the feeling of power — in the body of a gun. They settled for $73 million.
Gun extremists claim they need the Second Amendment to protect fundamental rights. In what other political or Constitutional conflict do we allow one side’s adherents to threaten to assassinate their opposition? Gun activists openly declare their intention to murder anyone, including law enforcement, who seek to enforce basic firearm regulations. But where are they when a woman’s right to choose is stripped away? Where are they when the right to vote is denied? Where are they when an armed mob storms state capitol after state capitol after state capitol, all the way up to the national Capitol to deny The People their right to Constitutional representation? A right to guns that exists only to protect a right to guns is in the end about one thing: preserving an armed person’s right to supremacy.
The First Amendment protects things we cannot be okay without. If we cannot express our personal truths, we cannot be okay. If we cannot express our political views in protest, we cannot be okay. If we cannot send our children to school, we cannot be okay. If we cannot attend movie screenings, we cannot be okay. If we cannot seek meaning in the universe at a synagogue, a mosque, or a church, enter into a romantic relationship, or simply exist as a child in America without facing the perpetual and ever-growing threat that someone will use their legally acquired weaponry to express themselves instead of words or protest or art, we cannot be okay.
Guns do not express ideas, they amplify aggression. Guns do not encourage exchange, they enforce obedience. There is no freedom of speech in the presence of someone who is armed and disagrees with you. The gun lobby has long maintained “An armed society is a polite society.” A society where some people can execute others for speaking is not a free one.
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said in 1991, “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime.” In the 30 years since he spoke those words, the U.S. has lost more than a million souls to gun violence, according to the CDC. This is a holocaust. Preliminary data suggests that 2021 has set a shameful new Second Amendment record: 49,000 dead. These are men, women, and children who will never get to express their truths to the world. We have lost them forever. If we value the freedoms of the First Amendment — the true freedoms this Nation promises — we must reign in the tyranny of the Second Amendment.
