The Lessons of a School Shootingin 1853 How a now-forgotten classroom murder inflamed the nation
Very interesting article.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/24/first-us-school-shooting-gun-debate-217704
The Lessons of a School Shooting–in 1853
How a now-forgotten classroom murder inflamed the national gun argument.
By SAUL CORNELL
March 24, 2018
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Though little remembered now, the first high-profile school shooting in the U.S. was more than 150 years ago, in Louisville, Kentucky. The 1853 murder of William Butler by Matthews F. Ward was a news sensation, prompting national outrage over the slave South’s libertarian gun rights vision and its deadly consequences. At a time when there wasn’t yet a national media, this case prompted a legal conversation that might be worth resurrecting today.
..............One of the most interesting features of the response to the Ward verdict—and one worth remembering for gun-control advocates today—was the way critics attacked Kentucky’s broad interpretation of the right to bear arms in self-defense. Legal critics of the trial argued that Kentucky law had veered too far from mainstream American constitutional thought, which had always balanced the right of self-defense against other rights, such as the right to enjoy peace. According to this way of thinking, Ward’s actions were not a vindication of American ideas of liberty, but a distortion of them, encouraging anarchy rather than true liberty.
Although advocates for the modern gun rights movement claim to be champions of the Founders’ vision of the Constitution, they have actually taken their cues from this later, libertarian vision of gun rights—one that was developed by slave-owning judges in antebellum America. In fact, the majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller—the 2008 case that struck down the District of Columbia’s gun-control law and established an individual right to bear arms unconnected to the militia for the first time under federal law—approvingly cited these Southern precedents as the foundation for his reading of the Second Amendment.
The Ward shooting, and the popular outcry it generated, reminds us that there’s another possible way to view the hierarchy of American rights—one in which the right not to get shot is on par with, and may even outweigh, the right to freely carry a gun and use it. The notion that the Second Amendment overrides these rights and prohibits sensible gun laws has never been the dominant position in American law. Most Americans in the 18th century and many in the 19th recognized this basic fact as fundamental to our Constitutional tradition. It is surely time to restore those other esteemed American rights to their rightful place in our contemporary constitutional debates over the role of guns in America.
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