ACLU Plans Media Campaign Promoting Gun Control

Wading into the stormy waters of the gun control debate, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California is launching a campaign to counter arguments that gun control legislation runs afoul of the constitutional right to bear arms.

“For far too long, the gun lobby’s myths about the 2nd Amendment have prevented a rational debate about gun control,” said Ramona Ripston, director of the organization, whose offices are located in a Los Angeles neighborhood where random gunfire is common.

Fresh from a state crime summit in which the ACLU was bitterly attacked for its civil libertarian stands, Ripston complained at a Wednesday news conference of meek and hypocritical legislators who are unwilling to pass gun control laws.

“It’s very interesting that there are all these proposals to control crime and nobody--at least in the sessions I was in--talked about guns,” Ripston said, referring to the summit called by Gov. Pete Wilson. “A way of controlling crime is to control guns.”

The Southern California ACLU affiliate will argue in newspaper advertisements, brochures and lectures that gun control and the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment are thoroughly compatible.

“As an advocate of our freedoms under the U.S. Constitution, the ACLU wants to set the record straight on what our forefathers truly intended about our right to bear arms,” Ripston said in a prepared statement.

The group’s new brochure bears a photo of someone holding a handgun, with the caption: “When the founders of the United States of America wrote the 2nd Amendment . . . this is not what they had in mind.” Rather, the brochure says, the Constitution’s authors wanted to “guarantee that states could maintain armed forces to resist the federal government. Most scholars overwhelmingly concur that the 2nd Amendment was never intended to guarantee gun ownership rights for individual personal use. . . .”

Richard Gardiner, a National Rifle Assn. attorney, scoffed at such statements. “I’m stunned the ACLU would reach that conclusion,” he said. “They obviously didn’t read anything.”

Ronald Garet, a professor of law and religion at USC, said there was “some interesting scholarship . . . suggesting kind of a middle ground.”

The nation’s founders envisioned that state militias--dependent on arms-bearing citizens--would fight the country’s battles rather than a federal army. So the amendment involves a right to bear arms, but the right is tied to the maintenance of a state militia--not to hunting or protecting yourself against criminals, Garet said.