"Live Free. Kids Die?"

That's the title of a blog post from The Boston Globe. Here's the entry:

Live free, kids die? The rate of childhood firearm fatalities in New Hampshire has doubled since a 2010 Supreme Court ruling in McDonald v. Chicago expanded the Second Amendment right to keep firearms in the home, according to a new JAMA Pediatrics study released this week. That gives the Granite State, which has among the most permissive gun laws in the nation, the distinction of also having the country’s highest-rising firearm child mortality rate since the ruling. “It’s a really important study that shows … that permissive firearm laws are associated with greater pediatric firearm death,” Kelly Drane, research director at the Giffords Law Center, told the Globe’s Amanda Gokee. “It shows the benefit of states taking action to protect children.” A reminder to everyone, including the justices and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kenney [sic], Jr.: Guns are the top killer of children in America, and remain a public health crisis crying out for attention.

That last sentence is exactly what I and many others have been saying for years. The availability of guns has led to thousands upon thousands of premature deaths, just as surely as killer microbes, car accidents, and lousy genetic luck, and public health responses -- sometimes with difficulty -- have met the challenge. The difference is there's nothing in the U.S. Constitution that embraces these causes of injury and death, but there is the Second Amendment's statement that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." There are sensible ways to read this provision.* When will the states, Congress, and the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court come to their senses? 

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* See, e.g., Blocher & Ruben, Originalism-by-Analogy and Second Amendment Adjudication," Yale L.J. (2023-24) {https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/originalism-by-analogy-and-second-amendment-adjudication}; Ruben, "Law of the Gun: Unrepresentative Cases and Distorted Doctrine," Iowa L. Rev (2021) {https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/A4_Ruben.pdf}.