TIME TO REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT-JUSTICE STEVENS WAS RIGHT

March 27, 2023

Justice John Paul Stevens was a Republican appointed to the Court in 1975 by President Gerald Ford. He served for thirty five years, until 2010. In 2018, eight years after his retirement, the ninety year old moderate wrote an op ed piece in the New York Times calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. That call resonates today more than ever. Justice Stevens passed away on July 16, 2019.

As I am posting this, the news media is covering the most recent mass murder by assault weapon, this time a young woman killing adults and children at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, TN.

I’ve come to agree with Justice Stevens. We’re past the point where we can solve this by tinkering around the edges with legislation. It’s become abundantly clear that the notion of every American being entitled to carry whatever deadly weaponry they wish is destroying our country and we must end it. Even after a repeal, it will take years until the exiting supplies of weapons and ammunition have been removed from society.

By coincidence, today is the fifth anniversary of Justice Stevens’ op ed piece and it rings truer and more compelling today than it did then. It is time to revisit Justice Stevens’ idea. Now that the Supreme Court is in the business of repealing Constitutional rights, no reason why we can’t utilize the Constitutional process to end the one Constitutional right we don’t need. First it will be necessary for Democrats to control three quarters of the states, so it’s time to take those races seriously. If the repeal movement picks up steam, we might see state and federal legislators ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in a compromise attempt to head full repeal. That will only mean they know the end is near and the American people have had enough of turning our country into a warzone for the sole benefit of the NRA and the gun manufacturers they serve.

Repeal of the Second Amendment would not mean that no American could ever own a firearm. It would mean that possession would be regulated like all other licenses. States would again be able to require a sound reason for possession or a carry permit. Legitimate hunters, sports shooters and collectors would have nothing to fear.

The Second Amendment has long outlived any usefulness. It’s not 1776 anymore.

Read Justice Stevens’ op ed piece:

Opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

By John Paul Stevens

• March 27, 2018

A musket from the 18th century, when the Second Amendment was written, and an assault rifle of today.Credit…Top, MPI, via Getty Images, bottom, Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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.

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.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. 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 school children safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

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