By Kayla Adams ’25
In March of 2023, Aiden Hale used two rifles and a handgun to shoot and kill six members of the Covenant Christian private school. Aiden Hale was a former student of Covenant. He killed three nine year old students and three staff members. The guns Hale used were bought legally, despite him having several emotional disorders due to the death of a close friend in 2022. However, after a search of Hale’s house the police found two shot-guns, one of which had a sawed-off barrel. Sawed-off shot-guns are illegal in the U.S., and Hale was able to buy six other guns as well. The police got to the school fourteen minutes after Hale shot through the glass front doors. Two of the officers each shot four times, killing Aiden Hale.
Hale was able to obtain the firearms he did because of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Second Amendment has been evaluated and proven to give citizens the right to bear arms. However, this right hasn’t always existed, and now that it does there are many regulations in place to protect the citizens from themselves. Without the right to bear arms, school shootings like Covenant wouldn’t happen nearly as often. This is why we need strict limits on who can buy which type of gun. Aiden Hale should not have been able to obtain any weapons because of his emotional health, let alone a sawed-off shot-gun and six other firearms.
There have been many court cases evaluating the Second Amendment and whether or not citizens should be able to bear arms. District of Columbia v. Heller was one of the first cases to say that the Second Amendment does give the citizens a right to bear arms. This case challenged the constitutionality of a law in Washington D.C. which said possession of handguns was illegal (“Second Amendment | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute”). The court analyzed the Second Amendment based on the time of the Constitutional Convention and said that the Second Amendment created an individual right for U.S. citizens to have guns. The court then abolished the D.C. handgun ban because it violated Second Amendment rights. However, in an earlier case (United States v. Miller), the court ruled that the Second Amendment was intended by the founders to give only citizens in the militia the right to bear arms.
The exact wording of the Second Amendment is, “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 has been interpreted in many different ways, the two prominent ones being; the right to bear arms for all citizens and, this amendment was intended to protect the citizens so therefore should only be used to arm the militia. The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees a “right of the people to keep and bear arms” (Second Amendment Does Not Guarantee the Right To Own a Gun (From Gun Control, P 99-102, 1992, Charles P Cozic, ed. — See NCJ-160164)). However, the meaning of this can’t be taken out of context, context meaning the setting and the objectives of the draftsmen. The need for a State militia, at the time the amendment was written, was the reason for said amendment, and State militia was made to protect the State. This was necessary because, at the time, the U.S. didn’t have a strong enough federal military. Since this is what the amendment was intended to do, this is what it should still do today. The right to bear arms should not be given to citizens unless the citizens receive military training on how to use firearms properly and have an intense background check.
On the other hand, the more recent interpretations say that the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting, or recreational use as long as there is no intention to harm another human being. According to an article titled “The Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms”, “The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed).” These recent interpretations focus on the operative clause (the part that identifies the actions in an amendment) of the amendment where it says, “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” However, these interpretations completely skip over the prefatory clause. Prefatory is another word for introductory, and without the introduction of an amendment, the rest of it is taken out of context and the meaning shifts. This makes the interpretation wrong and twisted.
Citizens are not always responsible enough to own firearms and should not be trusted with guns unless they receive intense training on how and when to use them. Background checks, investigations of mental health, and regulations based on the type of gun, should also be more strict to prevent school shootings like Covenant. In order to do this, citizens need to vote for politicians who agree with gun control. For example, congresswoman Sylvia Garcia (Texas’s 29th congressional district representative) is pro-gun control. With more people like Garcia in politics, there will be more rules and regulations on guns. Therefore, there will be less school shootings and children can learn without fearing for their lives.
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