It took physical courage in the early 2000s for a U.S. Marine to patrol the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan. It takes moral courage in 2023 for an elected official to admit to being wrong and to ask for forgiveness.

Second District Maine Congressman Jared Golden has displayed both kinds of courage. As to which is more difficult, only he can tell. As to which is more rare, I can attest it is the latter.

Last week Rep. Golden stood up in his hometown of Lewiston and acknowledged that his lifelong opposition to the banning of the sale of military grade assault weapons had been wrong. He took responsibility for his misjudgment, and asked for forgiveness and support from the victims and survivors of the assault weapon attack. It was the most courageous political speech by a Maine political figure since Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience against Joe McCarthy 73 years ago.

Golden is right. There is no reason to give anyone — of any mental state — access to a weapon whose primary civilian use has proven to be mass shootings at schools, concerts, shopping malls, and now bowling alleys and restaurants.

The rationale commonly invoked for such sales is that this is what Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson and George Washington instructed when they put the Second Amendment into the Constitution. But think a moment. The colonial rifle of the late 1700s shot three bullets a minute. The AR-15-style firearm — which the Maine murderer used — shoots around 45. Did the Founding Fathers think that everyone should have a weapon of the deadly capacity of an AR-15 in their homes? If they did, they would have changed the language of the Second Amendment to include cannons, since a modern AR-15 is more comparable to a colonial cannon in its deadly capacity than a colonial rifle.

Then there’s the question of why the writers of the Constitution wanted to preserve the right to bear arms. The amendment reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now, people in colonial times used their rifles to hunt and to protect their homes, just as we do today. But these were not given by the writers of the Second Amendment as reasons to protect gun ownership. The reason was to enable the people to function as part of a local militia.

In the days of the Constitution, there were no police departments. The way communities protected themselves from bad actors was to assemble citizens into a militia, something like a posse. So this Amendment was primarily intended to protect the public safety capability of cities and towns. It was not to protect people from going to the General Store and shooting everyone up; rather, it was to enable the community to protect itself through collective police action. That is the original intent of the Second Amendment.

Gun control is a matter of line-drawing. No gun rights advocate argues that people should be able to possess bazookas in their homes. Or howitzers. Or tanks. Or nuclear bombs. These are “arms,” broadly speaking, but not arms whose private ownership is thought to be protected by the Bill of Rights. On this, gun rights and gun control advocates agree.

They disagree only on where to draw the line on rapid-fire guns. My argument is that our colonial forebears did not and could not anticipate this kind of weapon when they wrote the Constitution, and that therefore they would have no problem with us today if we decided to limit the storage and use of rapid-fire weapons to licensed shooting ranges.

For years there has been a semi-religious belief among all Maine politicians that simply talking about the control of automatic weapons will end your political career. No political poll showing that the majority of Maine voters support modest gun safety steps — there have been many — has shaken that conviction. Now Jared Golden has stepped up and put the conventional wisdom — and his political career — on the line. He has done his part.

Now it is up to us, the voters of the 2nd District, to do our part. We need to reelect Golden in 2024. His reelection from a rural red district will send a message to every politician in Washington. You can stand up for innocent people, you can do the right thing, even in rural America, and you can still succeed in politics. It’s the kind of message that has the potential to break the national logjam on gun safety.

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