Your ABA
Outgoing President Silkenat delivers impassioned plea to address gun violence
Photo of James Silkenat by Kathy Anderson
In remarks summarizing the challenges and accomplishments of his term as president—including the efforts to fill unmet legal needs with work by underemployed lawyers, address the immigration crisis, preserve the confidentiality of lawyer-client privilege in the face of the National Security Agency's surveillance efforts, and push back against campaign attack ads targeting candidates who represented unpopular clients as attorneys—Silkenat became clearly emotional in talking about gun violence. He choked back tears and paused several times as he described the extent of shootings at schools around the country that left both students and adults dead or wounded.
A map was posted on a screen behind him with dots showing where school shootings occurred throughout the country since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There were 74 dots on the map.
"If you don't want a school in your community added to that map, then you as a lawyer need to do something," said Silkenat, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester in New York City who owns a farm near Newtown. That statement prompted a standing ovation from the members of the House.
Silkenat's speech to the House echoed remarks he made earlier in the ABA Annual Meeting at a showcase program on the topic. "Gun violence is a difficult and emotionally charged topic," said Silkenat at the program, "but we've got to take steps to reduce it."
Silkenat described a new product being advertised as one of the latest examples of the scope of the problem: bulletproof blankets for infants. "I'm immeasurably offended by that," he said. "We shouldn't treat shootings like tornadoes or other natural disasters, random and unexpected."
OTHER VOICES
Other speakers at the program sponsored by the Standing Committee on Gun Violence picked up on Silkenat's call for action, but they said the primary battleground over regulating guns will be in the political realm rather than the courts.Although the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that the right of individuals to own guns is protected by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the gun rights jurisprudence of the court still is developing, said Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe, especially on the issue of regulating how guns are manufactured and sold. But the justices have largely left more specific issues of gun ownership for the lower courts to hash out. "Inevitably, they have reached conflicting decisions," he said.
One area of potential conflict among the appellate courts is how the First Amendment applies to gun regulations in the context of the Second Amendment, said Tribe. He cited a July 25 decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta in Wollschlaeger v. Florida, holding that a First Amendment right of physicians to discuss gun safety issues with patients was trumped by the Second Amendment. "It's a ruling that I find implausible," he said.
Ultimately, Tribe said, "sustained educational and political efforts are more important than blaming the Roberts court for its rulings."
Jonathan E. Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, opened his presentation with a brief tribute to the center's namesake, James Brady, who died Aug. 4. Brady was President Ronald Reagan's press secretary in 1981 when he was wounded in an assassination attempt on the president.
Brady's story "showed what one bullet can do," Lowy said. "It affected him and his entire family, and ultimately it killed him." The Virginia medical examiner's office has declared Brady's death 33 years later a homicide.
