Michael McDowell: The fruits of populism are ripening, falling and rotting

• Author: Michael McDowell
• Published date: 29 June 2022
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

If all human life, from embryonic to centenarian, is sacred and requires protection, is it rational to allow hot-headed young men to buy, keep and carry multiple automatic weapons capable of inflicting slaughter of the innocents of whatever age

And yet in a few short days the US Supreme Court has interpreted the US constitution in exactly those ways. Reversing Roe v Wade has the effect of putting every state in the US in the same position as Ireland. It is for state legislators to decide on the circumstances, if any, in which any pregnant woman is legally permitted to terminate her pregnancy — as it is in Ireland.

Of course, Ireland and the US are coming to this issue from very different places — we had as a people by referendum enacted the 8th Amendment to forestall any court decision such as Roe v Wade or any legislative decision to legalise any kind of abortion. The US, by contrast, had a Supreme Court decision enshrining as a constitutional right a woman's right to choose, so as to prevent conservative states from outlawing or radically restricting the same right to choose.

The US 2nd Amendment provides as follows: "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."

In the Heller case in 1986, the late Justice Scalia delivered the majority opinion and in a very detailed historical analysis argued that the wording of the amendment did not imply that the citizen's right to keep bear arms was in some way conditional on their potential use in a state militia. He viewed the right as part of the Bill of Rights in the US constitution and that it derived from the right of individual self defence rather than idea of membership of an organised militia.

The recent mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, is but a grotesque example of where America's gun culture has bought its citizens. There have been 1.5 million gun-deaths in the US in the period 1968 to 2017, which as the BBC pointed out recently is more than the entire death toll of American soldiers in battles and wars since the declaration of independence in 1776.

In 2020, there were 45,000 gun-deaths, a 43 per cent increase since 2010. Of them nearly 25,000 were suicides while nearly 20,000 were classed as homicides. Of the 7.5 million new first-time gunowners in 2019 to 2021, half were women and 40 per cent...