Free Speech and Guns in 2037
By William Hausdorff and Eric Segall
Grandpa, I learned in school today that
not so long ago American hate groups were allowed to march through the streets
of our town, shouting threats and racial slurs at people, and to carry guns
while they did that. And that some
people got killed.
I’m so glad they can’t do that anymore.
Can you explain this to me? Because I
really didn’t understand it. Is all that
really true?
Well, you're too young to remember
this, but it all began to change with what happened in Charlottesville,
Virginia back in 2017—just about 20 years ago.
I
heard about Charlottesville in school—it’s famous, right? But I can’t remember
why.
I’ll tell you. Back in 2017, we Americans used to have some
odd ideas. We thought that having Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan marching
through multi-racial/religiously diverse cities with rifles and shouting white
power slogans—even though we didn’t like them—was protected by the First and
Second Amendments of our Constitution.
In fact, we would congratulate ourselves for being staunch defenders of
free speech and the Constitution—we told everybody that we were the model for
everyone else in the world!
But grandpa, weren't people scared,
especially black, brown and yellow people, when the Nazis and Klan marched by
their houses and schools and churches?
And what about non-Christians like Jews and Muslims? And how about
the children? That would have given me
nightmares!
Yes, many people were terrified by this.
But our best lawyers had convinced everyone—it's proudly
described in the law books at the time—that letting those
people shout, threaten and march with loaded guns through neighborhoods, personally targeting the people that lived there with their threats, was what
they called “protected speech.” These
people had a right to express themselves.
This, I’m afraid, was considered more
important than preventing people from being scared, or feeling threatened in
their own homes, or kids having nightmares.
But these odd ideas didn’t start all
at once. You might say it started about
40 years before Charlottesville, when our best lawyers had convinced the courts that we
had to allow Nazis to march through a neighborhood in Illinois.
Have you heard of Skokie? That’s where many Jewish people, including Holocaust survivors, lived. The Justices said that these Nazis had the
right to freely express themselves like anyone else, even though they were
against free speech for others.
At the time, we Americans were very
proud of ourselves, because many countries—especially those in Europe that had
been overrun by Nazis in the past—wouldn't have allowed these neo-Nazis or the
Klan to threaten people that way. But we
said that the US was strong enough to handle this.
Did the Nazis in Skokie carry guns too,
grandpa?
Some might have, but if they did they
hid them. That’s because at that time
nobody thought people could openly march with guns. I think way back then it would have been
considered crazy!
But … it was about twenty years later
that a group of regular people who own guns, supported by the companies that
make guns, began arguing that basically everybody should be able to own a gun
and carry it anywhere. And they
eventually convinced those smart Justices, actually only five of the nine
Justices, in 2008 I think. They even decided
that people had the right to own assault rifles that could kill many people in
just a few minutes. That came a little later.
Was that in the First Amendment too? Is carrying assault rifles considered
“freedom of expression”?
[Chuckles] Not yet! No, that was the Second Amendment, which
talks about this old idea of “well-regulated militias” being necessary for the
security of the state, and which was obviously meant to only apply to militias.
But then, over 200 years after the Second Amendment was passed, five of those
smart Justices, saying they were using history but really using something
called “living constitutionalism,” decided that the Second Amendment also
applied to owning guns for hunting and for personal self-defense. It even covered people who engage in hate
speech and are thus threatening other people. The Justices also said that states weren't
even allowed to have laws that would stop fanatics such as Nazis from carrying
guns.
That's crazy, Grandpa! Didn't
anybody try to stop it?
Nope, politicians were afraid to lose
their jobs if they spoke out against guns. Moreover, the Supreme court—the
smartest judges—said it was part of what made the US the country everyone
looks up to.
This is a weird story Grandpa.
But now I’m really getting scared—I thought my teacher said those things
aren’t permitted anymore.
Well, that’s where Charlottesville
comes in. Back in 2017, there was a march there for “White Power,” with
Nazis and KKK members carrying guns and shouting that they wanted to kill all
the Jews. There were a lot of people who
protested them, but the White Power crowd did, in fact, kill one innocent
person—drove over her with a car, and injured several others. Most people
were really outraged.
I
would think so!!
But then things got even more
twisted. A disturbed man who had become President of the United States 6 months earlier—everyone was very surprised
when he was elected—decided that some of the marchers were actually "fine
people.” And he said that on national
television.
Many people were upset with the
President and upset this happened. All the attention on the news went to the
disturbed President, and wondering if he would quit or be fired. And as you know Trump only lasted one year in
office.
But essentially no one—not even the
smartest lawyers and politicians—stepped back for a moment and realized there was
something crazy about a country that says it is okay for hate groups to march with
guns through cities and towns.
That is hard to believe, Grandpa.
It gets worse. Not surprisingly, the President's compliments
made the White Nationalists happy, and they began having more demonstrations
in different cities. This time, however, the counter-protestors (they
called themselves the "anti-fascists") began carrying guns too. Some of them said, “Two can play that game.”
What happened?
What any halfway intelligent person
would have predicted. It was very difficult for the police to stop this. We ended up having 10 years of bloody battles
between White Nationalists and anti-fascist folks in various cities. Many
people died, including some of your relatives.
How did it stop?
It only stopped after there were so many
deaths and riots that the country couldn’t take it anymore. People started to think a bit differently
about what really should and shouldn’t be allowed.
Hurray! But what happened to the
First and Second Amendments?
They’re still there, but now they are
interpreted a bit differently. What really happened was that after so many
deaths, riots, and injuries—some lawyers were killed in one of the great riots
of 2027—many politicians and even Supreme Court Justices began to think
harder. Some began to wonder if those countries
in Europe with restrictions were perhaps not so stupid. Those were the countries, after all, that had
been overrun by the Nazis, and so had long ago decided that violent,
threatening hate speech should not be protected at all, and that people
didn’t have a right to carry guns around in public.
We already knew this in 2017, you see,
but Americans had this idea that we were exceptional, and that our ideas of
free speech and gun rights were better than everyone else’s.
So the Justices revisited an old legal
rule—an American rule—they already had.
That rule had said that the government could place reasonable
restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech.
This time, they decided that the rule
could be used to make sure that the Nazis and Klan members, when they wanted to
speak their hate, had to do it in times and places where they probably couldn’t
start fights or be reasonably considered to create a climate of violent
intimidation.
But
what about the guns?
Just as important, those smart Justices
decided that people actually did not have the right to bring guns to protests. And many more politicians agreed, in public.
Wait, when did they decide that the
Constitution gave everybody a right to own guns?
In 2008.
Grandpa, it took them twenty years to
figure out that allowing people who are really angry at each other to carry seriously
dangerous weapons into the streets and get into arguments was a bad idea. Twenty years of violence.
I’m afraid so.
Even I know that was a bad idea, and
I’m only 11 years old.
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