CNN Opinion: Now that guns can kill hundreds in minutes, Supreme Court should rethink the rights question

As the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that may result in vastly expanded rights to carry firearms in public, I argue in this op-ed that we need a “common vocabulary and a shared metric for quantifying the lethality of firearms in historical terms when approaching Second Amendment policy and doctrine.” The lethality of modern firearms has grown exponentially since the mid-1800s, and the deadliness of a particular weapon is essential when considering the conditions under which an individual can carry a firearm in public.

Given the rapid technological change we’ve seen in firearms over the last century and a half, the notion that guns should be viewed equally across all times and places is logically flawed: “A gun is a gun is a gun” only in the same way that an ox cart and a space rocket are both vehicles.

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