Fundamental Rights

Yesterday I was Zooming with an old friend, who has been drifting in a measured and reasonable fashion towards a more conservative way of looking at the world as his hair greys and he rises up the income tax brackets. Somehow our conversation ambled around to gun ownership and I mentioned how Josh had not long ago characterized gun ownership as a public health issue and invoked the progress we have made controlling traffic fatalities over the last six decades as we've incorporated seat belts, air bags, rumble strips, regs on tensile strength of different parts of car bodies, driver's ed, drunk driving laws, etc., into our social fabric.

My buddy raised his voice about how he was a bit uncomfortable discussing a "Fundamental Right" such as gun ownership in such terms. But the thing is, the right to bear arms is certainly no more fundamental than the rights to speech, assembly, or press, and certainly our understanding of how each of them is best implemented under different technological conditions and at different historical moments has evolved over time. I would argue that the very fundamentality of a right means that we should think deeply at different times over what it means then, debate it openly and often, and then implement our understanding of it.

Certainly the idea that the founding fathers were some sort of holy men who has it all figured out and who laid down holy writ is overplayed. They were not Moses gone up on the Mountain of Reason. They were a great generation, no doubt, arguably one of the greatest, and we are in many ways fortunate to live in the country they founded and even on the planet they trod, but they did not have it all figured out and could not anticipate all that would follow them. It is meet and right that they should be studied, but not in a silly attempt to explain everything.