one in the House (the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA) and one in the Senate (the Protect IP Act, or PIPA), attempted to address this issue in 2012 by requiring Internet providers to monitor their users and block access to international sites that share files. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, which depend on open Internet access, opposed the legislation, claiming it would require them to censor their users’ practices and stifle free speech and innovation. Many of them went dark or threatened to do so in protest of the bills, and leaders in both houses postponed votes, effectively killing the proposed legislation in its current form.60 The issue of the protection of intellectual property rights on the Internet remains unresolved.
The question of whether the Internet needs to be regulated to ensure protection of people’s personal data privacy has become an important one in Congress, especially since we have learned that users of some sites, such as Facebook, have been manipulated into giving up their own data as well as information about everyone in their address books to firms like the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica. Unfortunately, congressional hearings revealed that members of Congress know next to nothing about how social media works, making it likely that we will leave the wolves in charge of the digital henhouse.
In Your Own Words
Explain the value of freedom of expression and how its protections have been tested.
The Right to Bear Arms: Providing for militias to secure the state or securing an individual right?
The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This amendment has been the subject of some of the fiercest debates in American politics. Originally it was a seemingly straightforward effort by opponents of the Constitution to keep the federal government in check by limiting the power of standing, or permanent, armies. Over time it has become a rallying point for those who want to engage in sporting activities involving guns, those who believe that firearms are necessary for self-defense, those who oppose contemporary American policy and want to use revolution to return to what they think were the goals of the founders, and those who simply don’t believe that it is government’s business to make decisions about who can own guns.
Why Is the Right to Bear Arms Valuable?
During the earliest days of American independence, the chief source of national stability was the state militia system—armies of able-bodied men who could be counted on to assemble, with their own guns, to defend their country from external and internal threats, whether from the British, Native Americans, or local insurrection. Local militias were seen as far less dangerous to the fledgling republic than a standing army under national leadership. Such an army could seize control and create a military dictatorship, depriving citizens of their hard-won rights.
The restructuring of the U.S. military, and the growing evidence that under civilian control it did not pose a threat to the liberties of American citizens, caused many people to view the Second Amendment as obsolete. Although the militia system that gave rise to the amendment is now defunct, supporters of rights for gun owners, such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), argue that the amendment is as relevant as ever. They offer at least four reasons the right to bear arms should be unregulated. First, they argue that hunting and other leisure activities involving guns do not hurt anybody (except, of course, the hunted) and are an important part of American culture. Second, gun rights advocates claim that possession of guns is necessary for self-defense. Their third argument is that citizens should have the right to arm themselves to protect their families and property from a potentially tyrannical government. Finally, advocates of unregulated gun ownership say that it is not government’s business to regulate gun use.
Opponents of these views, such as Handgun Control, Inc., and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, counter with several arguments of their own. First, they say that none of the claims of gun rights advocates has anything to do with the Second Amendment, which refers only to the use and ownership of guns by state militia members. Their second argument is that countries with stricter gun control laws have less violence and fewer gun deaths. Third, they argue that none of the rights of Americans, even such fundamental ones as freedom of speech and the press, is absolute. Finally, they point to the irony in claiming the protection of the Constitution to own weapons that could be used to overthrow the government based on that Constitution.61
Legislation and Judicial Decisions
Although various kinds of gun control legislation have been passed at the state and local levels, powerful interest groups like the NRA have kept it to a minimum at the federal level. The 1990s, however, saw the passage of three federal bills that affect the right to bear arms: the 1993 Brady Bill, requiring background checks on potential handgun purchasers; the 1994 Crime Bill, barring semiautomatic assault weapons; and a 1995 bill making it illegal to carry a gun near a school. The 1995 law and the interim provisions of the Brady Bill, which imposed a five-day waiting period for all gun sales, with local background checks until a national background check system could be established, were struck down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they were unconstitutional infringements of the national government into the realm of state power.62 In September 2004, Congress let the ban on semiautomatic weapons expire. While some Democrats in Congress promised to reintroduce the ban, action proved impossible because the powerful NRA has framed the conversation around guns in terms of rights. The narrative they have persuaded most Americans to believe is that the Second Amendment unequivocally guarantees all Americans the right to own guns (when even a cursory reading disputes that) and that any limitation on that right is an assault on the Constitution and the beginning of the slippery slope to the end of American liberty. Business Insider says the NRA is “a juggernaut of influence in Washington” because it is simultaneously “a lobbying firm, a campaign operation, a popular social club, a generous benefactor and an industry group.”63 By industry group, the author means that the NRA not only represents gun owners but that much of its financial and political clout comes from gun manufacturers who stand to make considerable money when people feel their guns or lives are threatened. In part, its strength also comes from its members, not because they are a majority of Americans, but because they are an intense minority, passionately unwilling to tolerate any compromise in the protection of what they believe is an essential right.
That has made the NRA one of the most powerful forces in the United States. From one gun massacre to the next—whether at a movie theater, at a shopping mall, or, increasingly, inside a school—rhetoric favoring gun regulation has bloomed and then . . . nothing happens. The NRA and its spokespeople argue that the issue is mental health, not guns, and that more guns, not fewer, are necessary to stop gun violence.
Between the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012 and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shootings in 2018, more than four hundred additional people were killed in more than two hundred school shootings.64 The Parkland, Florida, deaths added seventeen to that total. As we saw in What’s at Stake . . . ? in Chapter 1, the students from Parkland created a much more effective counternarrative in response to the NRA: “Why is your right to a gun more important than my right to life?” By the numbers of voluntary surrenders of AR-15s following the shootings at MSD, it was clear that this was a narrative that resonated even among some assault weapon enthusiasts. Unfortunately, it did not resonate quickly enough to save lives. Narratives take time to change and the NRA has lots of money and power behind it. In 2018, many Democratic members were elected to Congress who do not owe the NRA but they cannot
