Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

When the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, its expansive notions of liberty excluded an awful lot of people.

Blacks, women, non-property holders — there were all sorts of Americans deemed unworthy of the blessings bestowed by the words.

And for nearly 230 years, the story of America has unfolded largely along the lines of growing that original, privileged pool to include more and more of the population.

A war ended slavery and ushered in the slow legal march (still stepping) toward racial equality.

Women gained the right to vote in the early 20th Century and continue to strive for their rights to be as respected as men’s.

And the story goes on and on.

But the fundamental tension there — between respecting the founders’ intent and recognizing that liberty can and should mean something different today than it did nearly a quarter millennium ago — is and has always been a defining characteristic.

Which brings me to this idea: Why on earth, when we are talking about gun rights, do we begin and end that discussion with an assumption about liberty that was forged more than 200 years ago?

The authors of the Constitution were brilliant guys, most of them, and they set forth a structure of government, a republic, that has endured longer than any other currently on the planet.

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But they were wrong — perilously, dead wrong — about a great many things, too. Sometimes they were wrong because of the time in which they lived; they couldn’t contemplate the cultural, technological and societal changes that were to come. Other times, they were wrong because they were just flawed — racist or sexist or limited in their understanding of the fundamental nature of equality.

We have rethought their visions many, many times since the Constitution was ratified.

When we talk about guns, shouldn’t we acknowledge that maybe, so many years later, the virtual free flow of weapons in an America that’s bigger, more diverse, and far more complicated than the one the founders lived in just doesn’t make sense?

Why shouldn't we recast the Second Amendment to recognize more of a balance between the rights of gun owners and the victims of the massive proliferation of gun possession, legal and illegal, that has led to intolerable carnage?

The most recent reminder, of course, was last week’s shooting in Orlando, in which an American citizen armed with legally bought firearms killed nearly 50 people in a night club.

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Anyone want to take a crack at relating that incident to the founders’ ideals around self-defense, the need to be armed?

It would be fascinating, unhinged reading.

And worse, let’s talk about what goes on daily in cities like Detroit, where the free flow of weapons, mostly bought (at least in the first instance) through legal channels, results in hundreds of murders each year, and has turned, recently, to include more killing of children.

The defense of the Second Amendment always centers on the rights of legal gun owners to protect, recreate and hunt. And I’m definitely not questioning those rights.

But what about the rights of everyone else to be free of the menace of the sheer number of guns in circulation, the easy access to them by criminals or terrorists or the insane, and the carnage that stacks bodies high in morgues all over America each year?

Two hundred and twenty-nine years after the Constitution was written, we seem wildly overdue for a reconsideration of the balance between those rights, and maybe even a rewriting of the amendment that, under current interpretation, seems to protect responsible and irresponsible gun use equally.

Somehow, the right to own a shotgun that you use to protect your home has come to be seen as threatened by measures that would keep a nut from buying an AR-15 at a sporting goods store and spraying up a nightclub.

That's the thinking, though, of the gun industry, whose powerful lobby buys much of our government and whose profits soar regardless of whether its products are used to shoot deer or cripple little children in Detroit. And the courts have interpreted the Constitution, for many years, in ways that reflect the gun lobby's powerful interests.

That, to me, says something fundamental, like the Second Amendment itself, is horribly out of whack.

I can’t drive a car without a license that I get from the government; if we did the same for guns, how would that infringe on legal ownership?

I can’t own a car without registering it with the government, and operating it according to strictures set out in law. If guns were treated the same, how would that prevent hunters or sport shooters from exercising their rights?

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And if I lose a car — in a theft, for instance — without reporting that to police, and that car was later used in a crime that resulted in multiple deaths, you’d better believe the police would be knocking at my door. If I had a habit of “losing” cars that wound up being used in deadly crimes, I’d be in even more trouble.

If we required that every gun that’s manufactured be fired and its “signature” ballistics recorded in a national database, how on earth would that implicate law-abiding citizens’ ability to exercise their rights?

Even better, what if we restricted the kinds of guns that could be manufactured, sold or bought in the United States? What if we limited magazine sizes and weapon types?

None of it would harm the rights of legal gun owners, and all of it would help protect the rights of those who are slaughtered by people wielding guns that are too easily available, too easily distributed, too easily bought, sold, lost, given away and funneled into menacing hands every day.

Acknowledging that isn’t turning against the Constitution — it’s embracing what the document has meant to this country, over time. Much of what was originally written is still relevant, and important today. But so much of it is not. We’ve amended it 17 times — added restrictions and taken them out, changed the structure of government, the reach of protections, the scope of equality.

It’s way past time to look at the Second Amendment through the same lens. We can expand liberty — the right to be free from the chaos we are all witnessing, and enduring — and build on the very notions of equality the founders imagined.