MODERATOR
If background checks are to be of any use, they should apply to all gun sales, not just some. Isn’t that what Heaton-Harris is proposing?
CONNORS
Precisely. The bill expands the scope of gun regulation. And it’s yet another affront to Americans’ constitutional rights.
SLOANE
No. The bill closes an absurd loophole, which allows people on terrorist watch lists to buy guns without any check whatsoever.
CONNORS
It’s an incursion into individual liberty by an all-powerful government.
SLOANE
What, like drivers’ licenses?
CONNORS
Drivers’ licenses?
SLOANE
It’s illegal to operate a car without going through rigorous theoretical and practical assessments. That’s a clear constraint on the freedom of individuals to drive cars or pilots to fly planes.
You know, in Japan, chefs train for seven years before they’re allowed to serve a poisonous blow-fish called “fugu.”
CONNORS
What does any of this have to do with background checks?
MODERATOR
That is a fair question!
SLOANE
Does anyone in this room think that the government should abolish drivers’ licenses?
CONNORS
That’s absurd.
SLOANE
Why? They are a government incursion into individual liberty. We accept them because they make sense. The more dangerous the machinery, the more rigorous the test should be. I think we can extend our definition of dangerous machinery to semi-automatic firearms.
CONNORS
Except the Second Amendment to the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right to drive cars. Or operate machinery. Or serve blowfish for that matter. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. Perhaps you haven’t read it lately.
SLOANE
The Second Amendment was signed in a time when the average life expectancy was 38. And it was common practice for our Founding Fathers to resolve their differences at dawn, in a gunfight. What may have been perfectly sensible in those alien times is wholly inadequate to solve the problems of the present.
CONNORS
The United States Constitution has stood the test of time. It’s authored to confer unimpeachable rights which don’t change depending on which way the wind’s blowing. It’s so authored with the specific intent of keeping at bay the Elizabeth Sloanes of this world who want to wipe their asses with the Constitution and replace it with their own judgment because she knows better than the Founding Fathers of this great nation.
SLOANE
Nothing is unimpeachable, not even the Constitution. It’s ironic that the very statement of rights you’re so quick to invoke is, in fact, an amendment!
MODERATOR
I may not like it either, Elizabeth, but it is the Second Amendment. It comes right after freedom of speech, religion, and press and somewhere before freedom from search and from having to testify against yourself — they’re all sort of bunched together. It’s called the Bill of Rights! How do you get around that?
SLOANE
We don’t need to. The Supreme Court already made it clear that the right to own a gun is subject to lawful restrictions. One of those is background checks.
CONNORS
Universal background checks are an infringement. What part of “shall not be infringed” don’t you get?
SLOANE
I get that that’s the weakest, most mind-numbing retort in your impoverished arsenal. Sort of a last refuge for those with no real argument at all.
CONNORS
You’re talking about the United States Constitution.
SLOANE
If they could produce a rational winning argument, I’d gladly migrate to their side, but “Because it says so in the Constitution, the Bible, or my horoscope” is not a winning argument. It’s a ripcord — an intellectual equivalent of a yellow, pant-pissing wimp cowering behind mommy’s skirt.
