The forces that shape gun culture
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. How did we get to the point where there is a mass shooting nearly every day, and yet it keeps getting easier to purchase guns, including assault rifles? That's what my guest Mike McIntyre has been trying to track. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times and has covered gun violence during much of his four-decade career in journalism. His new book, Ricochet, Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, includes new insights into the National Rifle Association and the gun rights movement. They're based in part on NRA documents he got access to, as well as the papers of the late John Dingell Jr., a longtime congressman who, while in office, simultaneously served on the board of the NRA.
Dingell was a leader in popularizing the interpretation of the Second Amendment as applying to individual rights as opposed to the collective rights of a well-regulated militia. McIntyre's book also includes some fascinating early history, including how controversial the Second Amendment was at the time it was written. Among the other subjects McIntyre has been covering for The Times is a recent story about ICE's legal cases against people charged with assaulting ICE agents and how those cases are crumbling in the courts. McIntyre has been part of teams that have won three Pulitzer Prizes. Mike McIntyre, welcome to Fresh Air. I really learned a lot from your book, so I'm glad you wrote it. Let's start with the AR-15 case before the Supreme Court, because they, at the end of this previous term, agreed to hear it.
So we'll probably get a verdict at the end of next term. And this case is going to determine the standard for how the legality of gun laws are determined. And the question is the use of the word common use. Can you explain... what the wording is about.
Thanks, Terry, for having me. Yeah, this particular case that the Supreme Court's agreed to take up promises to be pretty controversial and I think impactful. As you pointed out, you know, when they take up these arguments in the fall and eventually come to a decision, the outcome is likely to turn not on big debates about public safety, but on this rather arcane technical question of whether or not an AR-15 can be considered to be in common use. This was a test that the Supreme Court itself created in an earlier gun rights case. And essentially what it says is that if a gun is commonly used, if a lot of people have it, it's popular, it's protected by the Second Amendment and can't be banned. And I think it's likely, given the court's recent history, that they probably will decide, the majority will, to overturn these bans.
There's nothing in the Constitution, the text or history of the Second Amendment that reflects this idea of a common use testing. That is one of several things that the modern era Supreme Court since the Heller decision in 2008 has created to try to help lower courts navigate the possession and use of firearms, what's legal and what's not.
But how is a jury supposed to decide what common use means? And why should that be a determining factor? I mean, it could be a marketing thing, like the guns with the best marketing are the guns that get to be most legal. Is that the way it's going to work?
This is a question that the Federal Appeals Court in Illinois actually raised a few years ago when this very issue came up. And the appellate justices took a very dim view, or at least a couple of them did, of of the common use test, and they raise some of the issues you just did. And one is just a simple logic problem. Okay, so let's say in the case of fully automatic machine guns, for example, which are essentially not going to say outlawed, but they're very, very difficult to get in the United States.
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