The robust American traditions of free speech and gun rights are clashing at anti-racism protests this year in a way rarely seen before in the United States, legal scholars and law enforcement leaders say.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees citizens the right to free speech, and the Second the right to bear arms. But they are colliding in new ways, as “open carry” of guns to demonstrations becomes more common, officials at six police departments along with six legal scholars said. Some worry that US democracy will suffer if guns intimidate would-be protesters from voicing their opinion. The gun culture and the exercise of free speech and assembly are “all competing in the same space,” said Timothy Zick, a law professor at the College of William and Mary who studies armed protests.
Mostly peaceful mass protests in several US cities for racial equality following the May 25 death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis, Minnesota police are sometimes being met by people with weapons.
On August 25, the issue came to a head when Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, used a rifle to kill demonstrators Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, during a protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His lawyers say he acted in self-defence. In Portland, Oregon, Michael Reinoehl, 48, a self-described supporter of the far-left movement Antifa, was charged in the fatal August 29 shooting of Aaron Danielson, 39, who was in a caravan of President Donald Trump’s supporters who clashed with anti-racism demonstrators.
Zick and Gregory Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St Louis, are part of a group of scholars who are researching how the First and Second Amendments began to collide following a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling. It struck down a Washington DC ban on private handguns, saying “the Second Amendment protects an
individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia,” essentially giving every person the right to carry a gun. — Reuters
Brad Brooks
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