John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

“I actually think repealing the Second Amendment would lead to a civil war in the United States”, said Dudley Brown, of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Of course, the means to repeal the amendment also dates back to the 18th century. Democrat Hillary Clinton made gun control a focal point of her presidential bid but spoke of the need to “balance legitimate Second Amendment-rights concerns with preventive measures and control measures”.

We should remove rights from the Constitution because it would be dramatic and because it would move marchers closer to their objective?? It’s something of a different story at the state level, where there is a patchwork of gun laws.

I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, but it is extremely rare for a retired Supreme Court justice to inject himself into a matter in this way.

Repealing the amendment would be extremely hard.

Organizers estimated 800,000 gun protesters gathered just in the nation’s capital alone on March 24, and the day has been credited as the largest youth protest since the Vietnam War era. See more 360 stories here.

“We are not trying to fight against the Second Amendment here”.

The strategy, he said, has been to deploy a piecemeal, “nickel and dime” approach.

Beyond that, the poll showed that a plurality of Americans do not see the Second Amendment as something set in stone.

“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”, Stevens wrote. In 1999, for instance, a Hearst Newspapers poll found that 59 percent of respondents said they did not know the goal of the Second Amendment. But if nothing else, Stevens’s op-ed brings forth the conversation of how important the supposed unlimited right to own weaponry capable of mass murder really is.

While numerous students and activists have cast the Second Amendment as outdated, there have been no major organized efforts to repeal the amendment – which in itself would present a massive undertaking. For one, none of the natural rights codified in the Constitution, none – not freedom of speech, press or religion, or the ability to vote or to demand due process – had a longer or deeper history in English common law and tradition than the right to defend oneself.

“James Madison understood this very well”.

But just 1 in 5 Americans support Stevens’ call to repeal the amendment, according to a survey conducted in February.

Steve Chapman, a member of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, wrote that Stevens is “wrong on both substantive and political grounds”.

US President Donald Trump was reportedly busy with golf engagements at his private resort in Florida while the protests took place and did not care to utter any word on them.

“For the foreseeable future, that has zero chance of happening”, he said. The same can be said of semi-automatic pistols and the much-maligned AR-15 style semi-automatic rifles.