Commentary

Guns are Good; A Productive Response

Guns are Good
Judge rules—you must pry it from my cold dead hands.

On Thursday, March 9, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the longstanding ban on the ownership of firearms by individual citizens in a groundbreaking 2-1 decision. While the Attorney General for the District of Columbia has appealed this decision to the full body of the appeals court and the ban will remain in place while the case is under appeal, it is nonetheless a huge victory for both gun rights and personal freedom advocates across the country.

The Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, commonly known as the DC gun ban, was passed in June of 1976. The ban made it illegal for anyone who is not a police officer to purchase or register a firearm of any type in the District of Columbia. Many constitutional rights advocates have denounced the ban, labeling it a clear violation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, since the District of Columbia is not technically a State, it falls into a legal gray area that people are still trying to define.

As a result of the gun ban, murder and violent crime rates in the District skyrocketed out of control, turning many of the District’s neighborhoods into some of the most dangerous places in the country. Criminals, emboldened by the knowledge that they are the only ones in possession of firearms, were essentially given the green light to turn the law-abiding residents of DC into their victims. Even today, as the country as a whole has achieved record low rates of violent crime, DC is struggling with rates more than five times the national average. Clearly the gun ban has not had its desired effect of reducing crime in the district.

If the DC Circuit’s overturning of the gun ban is upheld and the citizens of the District of Columbia are once again allowed to once again own firearms, it will serve as a welcome relief to the overworked police force in the DC area. With an armed populace, one can expect to see the amount of violent crime in DC drop quickly and significantly as potentially violent criminals realize that it is no longer open season on the law abiding citizens of DC and will begin to think twice before they commit a crime. As crime rates fall in line with the averages across the rest of the country, neighborhoods that have become hotspots of criminal activity during the gun ban will begin to cool and become much better places to live.

The DC gun ban has long been a textbook example for why the government should never infringe upon the rights of law-abiding citizen to own a firearm. The Second Amendment has been absolutely marginalized with the gun ban. While it is inconceivable that the First Amendment would be limited in this way, the second has been suppressed with ease. The revocation of rights is a slippery slope that can not be tolerated. Hopefully the courts will see this mistake for what it is and uphold the overturning of the ban as well as working towards eliminating the gray area that the District of Columbia falls under—conferring all of the rights of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all of the other amendments upon its residents.

A Productive Response
Bacow sponsors a broad look at journalism.

Early on the morning of March 10, a variety of journalists gathered for an Intercollegiate Workshop on College Journalism called “Reporting from Within the Ivory Tower: Rights and Responsibilities of Student Journalists.” In response to last semester’s controversial Christmas carol published in this magazine, President Bacow requested a forum for the discussion of campus journalism. Although he asked for an event that would directly respond to the controversy, the organizers from the Communications & Media Studies Program focused instead on two specific issues concerning college journalism in general. Each topic was discussed by a panel of Tufts alumni, with the first panel also including a lawyer who has worked with Tufts publications in the past. The panelists offered much insight benefiting all campus journalists. The redesigned focus of this conference not only produced an event with a much larger audience, but it generated a positive, productive response to last semester’s controversy.

Editors from the Daily, the Observer, and THE PRIMARY SOURCE worked together to create questions for the three panelists on this topic. The student editors created questions that were relevant to the issues student journalists face on an everyday basis.

The first panel, The First Amendment and the Campus Press, was by far the most useful. These questions produced discussions ranging from university censorship to policies regarding the destruction of notes after a story has been published. The lawyer on the panel, Rob Bertsche, explained situations in which even private universities run into legal troubles for trying to censor publications. He discussed the complimentary First Amendment right to the freedom of speech and the University’s obligation to uphold contracts—both in print or understood as reasonable expectations. The other two panelists, Phil Primack and Neal Shapiro, both Tufts alumni, spoke about their own personal experiences in larger media sources regarding the issues mentioned above. Since students rarely have access to either prominent, more experienced journalists, or to legal help when they are not in legal trouble, this panel presented an excellent opportunity to proactively learn more about their role on campus and the possible limits that come with it.

The second panel, Issues Facing the Campus Press, while interesting, had less practical value than the first panel. This panel consisted of four Tufts alumni who became reporters for larger news outlets after graduation. They answered questions about the standards of professionalism to which student journalists should hold themselves. While it is important for all members of a publication to maintain the same expectations of each other, this type of discussion is often most effective when carried out among staff members of the same publication. The most interesting aspect of this panel was hearing stories from the four journalists’ careers in and out of Tufts.

The March 10 journalism conference was President Bacow’s most productive response to last semester’s controversial SOURCE carol, even though he originally wanted to focus on the carol itself instead of journalism. Throughout the administration’s response in December and January, President Bacow should have spent less time focusing his efforts on name-calling and knee-jerk reactions; he should have sponsored more events like this one.