ICYMI: How Guns Harm Rather than Protect Free Speech
Elon Musk's false claim that the Second Amendment is the reason we've preserved the First
Elon Musk has recently proven to be an outsized influence on Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, and that fact hasn’t been missed by GVPedia leader Devin Hughes.
After first pointing out Musk’s disturbing ability to spread disinformation far, wide, and quickly in a September AWR post, Hughes then put dents in Musk’s supposed defense of free speech last week. It seems Musk’s influence isn’t sitting so well with many in the Republican party either.
In case you missed it, here is Hughes’ article again, below.
By: Devin Hughes
During former President Donald Trump’s recent rally in Butler, Pennsylvania — the same grounds where the mass shooting injuring Trump months before took place — Elon Musk was a featured guest. Throwing his full support behind the Republican ticket, Musk stated that Trump must prevail to “preserve the Constitution.”
In those comments, Musk further contended that “...free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote? You must have free speech in order to have democracy. That’s why it’s the First Amendment. And the Second Amendment is there to ensure that we have the First Amendment.”
I agree that free speech is essential to a functioning democratic system. Long-standing jurisprudence confirms that the First Amendment provides robust protections for speech, even speech that is objectively repugnant or false.
Outside of a few narrowly crafted exceptions involving direct personal harm (such as incitement or defamation), hate speech and misinformation are constitutionally protected.
I further agree that truth is crucial in order to make an informed vote and to sustain a healthy democracy. While government censorship of hate speech and falsehoods is not permitted due to the massive potential for abuse, that does not prevent anyone (including the government) from providing accurate information or calling out those who are hateful or devoted to deception. It also does nothing to stop people and organizations from refusing to interact with or platform particularly heinous actors.
Shining a light on disinformation and an adherence to truth is crucial to countering a Firehose of Falsehood.
However, the rest of Musk’s commentary demonstrates he is not the champion of truth he claims, as we have seen previously with his promulgation of disgraced former researcher John Lott’s fraudulent work.
Regardless of how important one considers the First Amendment and Second Amendment, the Bill of Rights was not ordered by importance. In fact, the First Amendment wasn’t the first in James Madison’s list of Articles.
The third and fourth proposed articles became the First Amendment, while the original first was never adopted, and the original second was passed as the 27th Amendment in 1992, with no connection between the First and Second Amendments, despite claims to the contrary.
The heart of Musk’s claim, though, is that the Second Amendment is the primary reason the United States has preserved its First Amendment rights, a common assertion in pro-gun circles. This is false. While for most of American history, the First and Second Amendments coexisted separately and peacefully, in recent decades guns have actually impaired freedom of speech.
The deleterious impact of guns on speech is most commonly seen with the explosion of openly carried firearms at political rallies and protests. Research shows that protests in which firearms are present are six times more likely to become violent, directly infringing on the right “of the people peaceably to assemble.”
Further, as a Washington Post survey revealed, people are less likely to attend a protest or rally in which people are armed, indicating a distinct chilling effect on protected speech. These realities were foretold nearly a decade ago in Firmin DeBrabander’s excellent book, Do Guns Make Us Free?, which highlighted how widespread gun carrying not only made us less safe, but also less free.
Carrying a gun at a protest or rally is not an expression of free speech, it is a threat to end the speech of those you disagree with, permanently. In the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas should prevail, not the ones carried by the threat of violence.
As legal scholar Darrell Miller elucidates, “the presence of a gun in public has the effect of chilling or distorting the essential channels of a democracy — public deliberation and interchange. Valueless opinions enjoy an inflated currency if accompanied by threats of violence.” This view is backed by a host of other legal scholarship warnings about the chilling effect of guns on public discourse, and the need to prevent the Second Amendment from infringing on the First.
Even more worryingly, though, is the growing threat of the insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment, which would grant anyone with a gun the right to oppose “tyranny,” no matter how expansive or extreme the individual’s interpretation of tyranny.
We’ve seen the consequences of this ideology before with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, carried out by an extreme NRA member in revenge for the Waco siege a couple of years prior. This ideology is alarmingly ascendant in far-right wing circles, as I personally witnessed at the NRA convention with its overt marketing to militants.
Tragically, we also saw what happens when the pro-gun slogan of “voting from the rooftops” — the chilling endpoint of introducing guns to political speech — is taken literally during Trump’s previous rally in Butler, PA.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Flickr.