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You perhaps are aware that Justice John Paul Stevens argued this week in the NYT that, with the shooting in Parkland, Florida students and their allies should lobby Congress and states to abolish 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,” wrote the 97-year-old former Justice, adding, “today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
Apparently, suggests the WSJ, Justice Stevens is still sore about losing the argument in the 2008 landmark gun-rights case, D.C. v. Heller, since he wrote the dissent in that case. Justice Stevens argued that the Second Amendment was intended to support a militia, not the individual right to bear arms. Reports the WSJ:
But he (Stevens) lost 5-4 as the majority held, with extensive citation from history, that the Founders intended the right for individuals. Some regulation of guns is legal under the Constitution, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, but not restrictions that would ban guns in common use.
Mr. Stevens also wrote in his op-ed, “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.”
But simple it’s not, the WSJ points out:
… repealing the Second Amendment would require a vote by two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Good luck with that, since even now most Democrats in Congress won’t come out in favor of even an ban on so-called assault rifles, much less repeal of the right to bear arms.
In light of former Justice John Stevens’s call to repeal the Second Amendment, NRO is reposting a 2015 article by Charles Cooke: An Open Rant Aimed at Those Who Would Repeal the Second Amendment, in which Mr. Cooke lays down the challenge: what are they waiting for?
