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Like many who live in the US, I am unable to comprehend fully the lack of effective response to the most recent mass shooting in Texas. The Onion was the only media outlet to portray accurately the pathetic reaction to what apparently is now a fact of life in America: every article in the current issue reads “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”.

What I find especially infuriating is how the defenders of the 2nd Amendment like to shoot down every possible remedy to this epidemic of violence. Background checks, limits on the capacity of magazines, or limits on the length of the barrel are all derided as inadequate. Apparently, the only acceptable solution to the slaughter of innocents to the 2nd Amendment defenders is one that solves every possibility of evasion. I am not aware of any other policy debate that is subject to such a high threshold of effectiveness.

But I am also perplexed why the burden of proof shifts to those who would like to prevent future massacres. An absolutist position on the 2nd Amendment is flawed in two ways. First, all the rights protected by the Constitution are justified in terms of advancing common interests. The 2nd Amendment is even explicit about the public interest served by the right to bear arms: the need to have people trained in the handling of weapons in order to have a well-regulated militia. I cannot see the public interest in assuring that anyone who wishes to own a military-grade assault rifle can have one. Nor do the defenders of the 2nd Amendment articulate the public interest is guaranteeing that “right”. I think it is pass time to demand that that public interest be part of the debate and not to simply dwell on the vapid assertion that a right is a right.

The second flaw is more significant. An absolutist position on the 2nd Amendment asserts that the right to bear arms is more important than the right to life (oddly, this position is confirmed by Charlton Heston’s defiant claim at the NRA Convention in 200 that anyone who wanted to take away his flintlock rifle would have to pry it out of his “cold, dead hands”.) That position is profoundly untenable and it reveals the strange situation in which we find ourselves: those who wish to more tightly regulate the sale of military-grade assault weapons do not need to defend that moral position since the evidence that those weapons have killed far more civilians that they have protected is overwhelming. The real burden of proof rests on those who believe that the right to possess those weapons provides a tangible benefit to society.

Any defense of the 2nd Amendment that does not carry this burden of proof is bullshit.