— by John Paul Stevens in the New York Times —
Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms.But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
(To read the full opinion go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html-stories)
Yeah. Right.
And while we’re at it, let’s also repeal the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, too.
“Free speech” should not include politically incorrect and bigoted statements.
“Unreasonable searches and seizures” only exempts the guilty, since the truly innocent have nothing to hide.
And “taking the Fifth” is always a covert admission of guilt. Why wouldn’t the innocent want to testify?
The whole Constitution is way out of date. Let’s throw it all out, and start over again. Wouldn’t a true democracy be better than the republic that we now have?
What is the Electoral College good for, anyway? It always lets the wrong guy win.
There you go again, Steve.
Along with its justification of slavery, the 2nd Amendment is one of the great stains on the US Constitution, it’s original sins.
But I, for one, do not delude myself that it could ever be repealed, given the makeup of the US electorate, which owns some 300 million weapons and counting.
But we COULD outlaw military-style assault weapons, as has California and several other states. That would be a good, attainable goal for the state of Washington, and perhaps serve as a model for other like-minded blue states.
I have little hope for the red states, but I wouldn’t choose to live there, either.
Here is what Justice Stevens says:
“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that ‘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,’” Stevens wrote. “Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
In addition, Americans won the Revolution only because they all had guns. There was no defense department to arm them. Today we have a rather well-equipped military.
The other reason for the 2nd Amendment is little known but extremely important. In the time before the American Revolution, local militias were often used as slave patrols. There is discussion in notes on the deliberations around the Constitution that reveal this as a major reason for wanting to retain armed militias. Do we really want to retain an amendment in our Bill of Rights based on slavery?
Repealing the 2nd Amendment “would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform,” Stevens wrote. “It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.”
The Second Amendment need not be repealed. All the rights in the Bill of Rights are subject to restriction based on common sense and the common good. The First Amendment has well-developed case law about speech restrictions (very few) and the Second Amendment is subject to restrictions as well. The fact that the Amendment refers to a “well-regulated militia” makes it even more so. Universal background checks and limiting the sale of military-type weapons are entirely consistent with the Amendment.
Steve, best comment I’ve read on here in a long time.