Pinkerton: Attacks in New York and Texas Move the Gun Control Debate in the Direction the Founders Wanted

Two bloody tragedies, just a few hours apart on December 28-29—the mass stabbings at a synagogue in Monsey, New York, and the thwarted mass shooting at a church in Forth Worth, Texas—have put questions about guns and public safety in a valuable new light. How do we stay safe? Especially in our houses of worship? And what should we do about the menace of marauders in our midst?

Yet at the same time, we could also say that the New York and Texas attacks put the public safety issue in a valuable old light. How so? Because we are seeing the right of each state to make its own decisions—for better or for worse, as the case might be—as enshrined in our founding document, the U.S. Constitution.

That is, the Founders fully intended for the states, not the central government, to take responsibility for many matters. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #45, published in 1788 as the Constitution was being ratified, “In the first place it is to be remembered that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects. … The [state] governments … will retain their due authority and activity.”

This is federalism. Federalism is the principle that the states should be sovereign, operating within our national federal system; as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932, the individual states should each be “laboratories of democracy.” Hopefully, over the long run, these “laboratories” will all find their way to better results, although, of course, there can be no guarantee that every state will do the smart thing.

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