It’s a curious feature of American life that when four innocents are killed by a gunman in Chattanooga, or when a young white supremacist opens fire inside a historic AME Church in Charleston, we talk about loosening gun safety laws.
In the aftermath of this week’s murders, Donald Trump managed the near-impossible—sounding like a mainstream Republican politician—when he argued, “Get rid of gun free zones. The four great marines who were just shot never had a chance.” He is hardly alone in proposing this solution to the epidemic of gun violence. “These terrible tragedies seem to occur in gun-free zones,” said Rand Paul in January. “The Second Amendment “serves as a fundamental check on government tyranny,” Ted Cruz has said.
But if these Second Amendment-purists really think that guns make places safer, if they really think that guns are an important check on government and safeguard of liberty, then why do so many of them keep their workplace—the U.S. Capitol—free of firearms?
For almost two centuries and until very recently, ordinary citizens had free run of the Capitol. Ironically, as Congress has become less hospitable to gun safety laws, and as conservative Republican legislators have grown more strident in their desire to see citizens carry open and concealed weapons everywhere—in churches and schools, on college campuses, at bars and restaurants—the one venue that has grown more gun-free, more secure and more restrictive is the building they work in.
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