To Solve the Gun Issue, Go to the Source
It's time to amend the Constitution again
WATERBURY, Conn. — Five people were injured in a shooting in Waterbury’s Brass Mill Center mall Tuesday afternoon. The victims, four women and a man between the ages of 20 and 26, were treated at area hospitals. Three have since been released. Two remain in stable condition.
Tajuan Washington, 19, was arrested for the shooting. The Waterbury resident was charged with five counts of first-degree assault, first-degree reckless endangerment, criminal use of a weapon, risk of injury to a child, illegal discharge of a firearm, illegal possession of weapons in a motor vehicle and carrying a pistol without a permit. Washington was arraigned Wednesday and held on a $2 million bond
The attack resulted from an argument between the shooter and the victims that escalated into violence. It was not a “random act of violence,” authorities told reporters.
The shooting happened barely more than two years after a similar event at the Brass City Center. In December 2023, in an altercation involving multiple individuals, 19-year-old Marcos Gonzalez Jr. shot a 17-year-old companion in the food court over a dispute involving the girlfriend of Gonzalez Jr. The victim required life-saving surgery. Gonzalez Jr. eventually plead guilty and, in January, was sentenced to two-years in prison.
Also, in November, Waterbury resident David Morkis, 36, allegedly beat a 57-year-old man to death in one of the Brass Mill Center parking lots. Morkis was apprehended in April and charged with first-degree manslaughter.
The mall was closed in the aftermath of Tuesday’s attack and remained closed Wednesday. It reopened Thursday, keeping normal business hours.
Writing that brief, which I did just to break things up, took me on an unexpected traipse down memory lane. One of my beats as a journalist was breaking news, so I’ve written many news shorts like that in the past.
However, that was more than 10 years ago. I didn’t think it would come back so easily, but, I was able slip right back into the no-nonsense style of reportage characteristic of breaking news, where journalists write as if they are trying to impersonate the computer programs that are poised to eventually replace them.
The experience was also familiar because my journalism stint took place in Connecticut, where I lived for a decade, and I briefly wrote for the Waterbury Republican-American. I covered business news for the Rep-Am (what, you’ve never read my hard-hitting exposé from 2015 about the controversial mattress recycling tax that the state imposed on new mattress sales??). But, given that last week’s shooting happened in a commercial center, I would have been all over the business angle if I still had a byline at the paper.
But, the real reason that writing this brief resonated was that I know both the mall and the city quite well. I lived in Middletown, Connecticut during my years in the state, about 20 minutes from Waterbury.
However, through people that I met there, Waterbury became my social center for several years. I’ve been to Brass Mill Center quite a few times.
The opening blurb typifies the kind of cursory coverage that readers or viewers outside the region got about the armed assault in Waterbury—if they got any, that is. The national media picked up the incident initially, but lost interest once it became a local crime story with no fatalities. To put a new spin on an old news industry maxim (if it bleeds, it leads), if it doesn’t bleed for long, it doesn’t lead for long.
More than that, journalists—especially in this era—are drawn to narratives. Thus, if national reporters can’t depict a gun-related crime with the words “active shooter,” their attention fizzles quickly (unless, say, the suspect was wearing a Make America Great Again hat or had posted an inflammatory, online rant beforehand).
But, the disregard by the press-at-large for gun stories that don’t involve “random acts of violence” is shortsighted, gun violence victim advocates say. “Mass shootings” account for only 1% of the gun-related deaths in the U.S., according to The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. More than a third of gun fatalities result from non-random homicides (60% are from suicides), which last week’s shooting at the Brass Mill Center could have easily become if the suspect’s aim had been more deadly.
The Brady Campaign and other, similar groups make the case that all civilian, gun-related deaths show the need for gun restrictions. Whether people shoot other people whom they don’t know, people whom they do know or themselves—and whether the shootings are intentional or accidental—the vast majority of these events would be preventable through common-sense gun control measures, advocates argue.
Of course, the term “gun control” is (pardon the pun) loaded. Gun rights supporters suspect that many what many backers of gun control really want is gun prohibition, and, to be fair, their suspicions are sometimes correct.
Naturally, gun rights supporters object to gun regulation on Second Amendment grounds. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms,” is constitutionally guaranteed, they point out.
But, gun control advocates also cite the Second Amendment to make their case. The freedom to keep and bear arms is placed within the context of maintaining “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” a circumstance that was relevant in the late-1700s but isn’t anymore.
Both sides apply some remarkable pretzel logic in their readings of this amendment, at least considering the ways they usually interpret the Constitution. Liberals, who mostly favor strict gun regulations, typically adhere to the “living Constitution” theory (i.e. that the Constitution’s meaning evolves as times change). However, when it comes to the Second Amendment, they become sudden converts to originalism (i.e. the belief that the Constitution means what its authors intended it to mean). They argue that the freedom to bear arms is conditional upon our national defense being dependent on militias, making it no longer applicable today.
On the other hand, conservatives, who typically champion gun rights, are strict originalists in their reading of almost every other part of the Constitution, but when they get to the Second Amendment, they are only strict about “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” and that it “shall not be infringed.” They favor a broader reading, however, of the section that bases this right on the necessity of militias. Departing from their norm, conservatives interpret the militia clause as pertaining to any threat to local communities, because, after all, militias weren’t simply “necessary to the security of a free state.” They were also protectors of hearth and home.
But, these debates are tangential to passing rational gun law reforms. There are two relevant matters, one political and one that pertains to public safety. What matters on the political side is being able to resolve the issue and eliminating the conflict surrounding it. What matters from a public safety perspective is eliminating shootings.
Both of these goals could be accomplished through cooperative policymaking. The operative, anti-partisan principle in this case is familiar: when you talk about taking away people’s rights, they get mad, enraged even. But, if you guarantee that their fundamental rights will be protected, they will be more receptive to common sense regulation in policy areas that relate to those rights.
This is one of the times when the Constitution is insufficiently clear. That means the gun issue ends up being fought out in courts and statehouses, along with Congress and the White House, obviously. Naturally, all this adversarial struggle reinforces America’s rampant political polarization.
But, if the Constitution were to be amended—perhaps via a constitutional convention—to address both side’s concerns on the issue, then the issue would go away. If Americans’ right to possess firearms was expressly codified in the Constitution, it would remove the fears of gun owners and supporters that any new gun regulations are a slippery slope that ends in gun bans.
The fact that there is a widespread fear of bans is demonstrated whenever a new gun law passes or is discussed by lawmakers. What happens next? Gun sales boom.
But, the prerogative of the government to regulate guns also needs to be spelled out in the Constitution. Otherwise, gun rights absolutists will object to any gun control laws, arguing that all restrictions infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms.
When opposing sides cling to these types of uncompromising positions, it guarantees that American political and culture wars will rage endlessly. A constitutional assurance given to backers of both gun rights and gun control, on the other hand, would function as a trust-building measure and a big step toward resolving the issue.
With the essential interests of the stakeholders—gun rights backers; gun control backers; the public—now protected, all sides can begin to cooperate to create sensible gun laws whose purpose, obviously, is to eliminate shootings. We all want that, regardless of our positions on guns, because we are all members of the public and, thus, have an interest in public safety.
We all want to live without having to fear that either ourselves or our families or friends could be victims of a shooting. Once both ownership and regulation of firearms are constitutionally embedded provisions, we can all start working together to finally devise policies that will prevent that from happening.
Portions of this post have been adapted from my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.