Before his closed-door meeting with gun-control advocates on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden chatted briefly with reporters. What he told them incensed right-wing news sources. The Drudge Report splashed headshots of Hitler and Stalin. The Examiner ran a story claiming that President Obama would "act like a dictator" by taking legally owned firearms from "nonviolent Americans" and that he would "ban guns."
What Mr. Biden actually told reporters was: "The president is going to act. There are executive orders, executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet, but we're compiling it all."
He made no mention of bans, or confiscation, which the White House-besides-could not accomplish through executive order, even if it wanted to. Operating without Congressional approval, President Obama could appoint a new ATF director or require federal agencies to report mental health records, but he could not enact an assault weapons ban, let alone an outright ban.
The distance between what Mr. Biden said and what The Examiner reported gets at why it's so difficult to conduct a national conversation on the regulation of firearms. If the gun-control camp mentions restrictions the anti-gun-control camp hears bans. If the former mentions a ban on certain kinds of guns, the latter hears all guns, plus confiscation.
Many gun-rights activists, moreover, seem to suspect that the other side argues in bad faith. In public, gun-control advocates may sound reasonable, proposing only limited regulations, but what they really want is to repeal the Second Amendment, or to overturn Heller, and force the complete disarmament of the civilian population. First they'll come for our Bushmasters, then they'll come for our hunting rifles.
The fear that restrictions are a Trojan horse, the prelude to outright prohibition, similarly animates the staunch defenders of another controversial right: Abortion.
Writing in Slate in 2006, during Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, the legal academic Dawn Johnsen argued that Senators asking whether he would overturnRoe were missing the point. He would more likely "hollow it out." Ms. Johnsen suggested that Roe opponents have taken an "incremental" approach to eviscerating abortion rights. They've pushed for restrictions such as waiting periods and "informed consent" laws; restrictions "designed to sound reasonable while also limiting the number of abortions performed, ultimately as completely as would a criminal ban."
Last December, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed an abortion bill requiring doctors to screen women for coercion (among other measures). Supporters claimed the bill was necessary to safeguard women's health; opponents said it was a paternalistic assault on women's rights. The same argument played out in Kansas in 2011, when the state set compulsory standards for abortion clinics. Supporters claimed the regulations were an effort to protect women from unsafe conditions; opponents said they were a ruse to curb reproductive freedom.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that the freedom to own a gun and the freedom to have an abortion are both "rights"-yet the most vehement gun- and abortion-supporters worry that Heller and Roe do not provide adequate protection. That's in part because these decisions are vulnerable to similar legal attacks.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit, a conservative, encapsulated the case against Heller when he wrote that the majority "read an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment's enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the citizenry."
In his Roe dissent, Justice Byron R. White wrote: "The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes."
These arguments amount to the same accusation: an over-active Supreme Court invented rights where none existed, and put itself above elected representatives. Both gun-rights and abortion-rights supporters, then, have to contend with an opposition that doesn't even believe that these precious rights are rights-no matter what a majority of Justices had to say.
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Judging from polls, a majority of Americans support gun and abortion rights, but also support greater restrictions on those rights. Gallup has found that 52 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, 69 percent favor 24-hour waiting periods, and 64 percent favor a law that would make it illegal to perform a "partial birth abortion," except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother. On guns, CNN found that 96 percent favor background checks, while roughly 60 percent support bans on the sale or possession of semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.
Fear and mistrust, in both the gun and abortion debates, inhibit sane, level conversation, and impede what moderates might consider reasonable regulations. In some alternate universe where gun-rights advocates believed their basic entitlements were secure, and that D.C. would never enact a general ban, maybe the National Rifle Association wouldn't have so much power. In which case, maybe it wouldn't be so difficult to prohibit the sale of high-capacity magazines, or to mandate waiting periods. And if choice advocates believed the same, maybe they wouldn't fight limits on late-term abortions, or object to waiting periods.
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If related anxieties pervade and frustrate the gun and abortion debates, it doesn't follow that these anxieties are equally realistic. Are the gun-rights activists just paranoid, or are they onto something? What about the abortion-rights activists? I'm pro-choice, and I favor gun-control. Perhaps for that reason it seems to me that choice supporters' concerns are more warranted. They have more to fear than fear itself.
Granted, even extreme-seeming gun-rights activists aren't totally delusional. There really are people who would abolish the right to bear arms, if they could. After Newtown Kurt Eichenwald argued in Vanity Fair that we should repeal the Second Amendment. On Twitter, the MSNBC host Ed Schultz asked "why should anyone own an assault rifle?" and suggested that "the confiscation of these types of weapons" will "have an impact."
But keep in mind that Mr. Eichenwald and Mr. Schultz are journalists. Politicians with actual power who support gun-control go out of their way to emphasize that they want regulation, not the end to legal ownership. In his state of the state address, New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to enact the "toughest gun assault weapon ban in the nation"-and noted that he's a gun owner.
By contrast, there's no shortage of prominent politicians who say they would vote to end legal abortion. Consider Mitt Romney's running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan. In 2010, Mr. Ryan told the Weekly standard "I'm as pro-life as a person gets." In 2011, he co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which stated that the "life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent" at which time "every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." The Republican party platform is, unambiguously, anti-choice. It specifies that "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed."
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Abortion-rights advocates have more cause for concern than gun-rights advocates. Still, the fact remains that both groups oppose restrictions that a majority of Americans would, apparently, find acceptable. Both groups turn debates that might focus on specific regulations into out-and-out arguments about essential rights, riling up everyone and settling nothing.
It might help matters if activists didn't treat every skirmish as if it would decide the war. Of course for that to happen, gun-control supporters would have to find a way to reassure the gun-rights camp that basic ownership privileges aren't at issue. Moderates who believe in better-regulating abortion without actually prohibiting it would have to enter the fray, mitigating anti-choice absolutism.
