David Jolly

Opinion contributor

It’s not because of mental health. It’s because those who suffer from mental health challenges have easy access to firearms in the United States.

It’s not because too many today subscribe to platforms of hate. It’s because those who espouse hate have easy access to firearms in the United States.

It’s not because youth are exposed to violent video games. It’s because youth who are exposed to violent video games have easy access to firearms in the United States.

Gun violence in America today occurs because those who wish to commit gun violence have easy access to firearms, and they benefit from some of the most permissive gun laws in the world.

Surely this could not have been the society contemplated by our Founders when they authored the Second Amendment — a sentence so tortured in its modern interpretation that little consensus exists among scholars some 230 years later.

'Well regulated' is key to gun rights

While the entire premise of the Constitution was to protect the individual’s liberty from government encroachment, our rights articulated in it are preciously fundamental, but they are not absolute. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes opined, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” The freedom of the press does not extend to libel. Freedom of religion does not extend to violations of public safety or endangerment of minors. Freedom of assembly is limited by laws addressing public disorder.

So too the Second Amendment right to bear arms is a fundamental right, but not an absolute one. In fact, for the rights articulated in the First Amendment, the Founders boldly began with “Congress shall make no law” prohibiting or abridging the rights therein. Curiously, they set the context of the Second Amendment by specifically referencing the necessity of a “well-regulated militia.”

Whether “well regulated” was the foundational phrase of the Second Amendment because it presumed some ongoing and evolving government construct around the rules of firearm ownership, whether it was meant to signify the need for training and proficiency, as at least one scholar suggests, or whether it was meant merely as a nod to what was presumed then to be the need for a perpetual militia organization, we know it reflected a contextual expectation of the state and today must allow for restrictions that we as a people, through our representatives, find appropriate.

And so today in America, as we awake from a weekend of carnage amidst a generation of senseless gun violence and death, it is appropriate that we expect new rules, new laws.

Background checks, weapons of war

Background checks must be universal. Universal means every single gun transaction should be subjected to a comprehensive background check of the purchaser or recipient. Every single one. Not just those at gun stores and gun shows, but private transactions and gifts among family and friends as well. If gun ownership is a protection for responsible law abiders, it shouldn’t be too difficult for responsible gun owners to pay for a background check on a firearm transaction through their nearest law enforcement agency just as a landlord pays for a credit check on a prospective tenant they’re entrusting with the license to operate their refrigerator.

Only a matter of time:Gilroy shooting victim attended my school. Soon, we'll all have a connection to violence.

Background checks must be comprehensive. Today, a background check is largely a check for past criminal prosecutions. Background checks must now include a search of non-prosecuted law enforcement encounters, allegations of domestic violence, public professions of violence on social media and other platforms, and yes, mental health records. It is not an infringement of one’s liberty for the state to thoroughly ensure that one’s lawful gun ownership will, as the second amendment aspires, contribute to “the security of a free state”.

And weapons of war should be banned or made functionally obsolete. We often debate an assault weapons ban as though it would be revolutionary public policy, but we forget that between 1994 and 2004, federal law prohibited the manufacture for civilian use of assault weapons and large capacity magazines. If a ban on the manufacture or possession of assault weapons is not politically attainable today, let's at least agree that background checks for assault weapons should be as thorough, as lengthy and as adversarial as the security clearance process for a federal employee. In each instance, the individual is being entrusted to abide by and promote the rules of a safe society despite being entrusted with the very tools to compromise our safety.

Security and general welfare top goals

Finally, zero tolerance. We must dramatically increase investments in enforcement, and statutorily increase penalties against offenders. From additional law enforcement officers, to investments in technology, to prosecutors, it's time to prioritize our collective public safety over this false debate that regulation of firearms somehow compromises the Second Amendment. It simply does not.

Create a new future:Would the Founders want our kids to die in school shootings like Santa Fe? I doubt it.

Our Founders did not embed an unadulterated freedom to gun ownership in the Constitution. To read the Second Amendment in isolation as doing so is dangerously ignorant. The Constitution is a brilliant but imperfect document premised on protecting as much individual liberty as it can harness for the expressed purposes of ensuring domestic security and the general welfare.

Easy access to firearms has created the tragedies we now regularly witness. Its defense represents a fundamental ignorance of virtually every underlying tenet of the Constitution otherwise designed to provide for our safety.

Gun ownership is not beyond the reach of regulation, nor for some, prohibition. It’s time to have this debate.

Attorney David Jolly was a Republican congressman from Florida's 13th district from 2014 to 2017. He left the GOP last September and is now a registered independent. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidJollyFL