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I teach the Constitution for a living. I revere the document when it is used to further social justice and make our country a more inclusive one. I admire the Founders for establishing a representative democracy that has survived for over two centuries.

But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong. This is one of those times. We need to say loud and clear: The Second Amendment must be repealed.

As much as we have a culture of reverence for the founding generation, it's important to understand that they got it wrong and got it wrong often. Unfortunately, in many instances, they enshrined those faults in the Constitution. For instance, most people don't know it now, but under the original document, Mitt Romney would be serving as President Obama's vice president right now because he was the runner-up in the last presidential election. That part of the Constitution was fixed by the Twelfth Amendment, which set up the system we currently have of the president and vice president running for office together.

Much more profoundly, the Framers and the Constitution were wildly wrong on race. They enshrined slavery into the Constitution in multiple ways, including taking the extreme step of prohibiting the Constitution from being amended to stop the slave trade in the country's first 20years. They also blatantly wrote racism into the Constitution by counting slaves as only 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation. It took a bloody civil war to fix these constitutional flaws (and then another 150 years, and counting, to try to fix the societal consequences of them).

There are others flaws that have been fixed (such as about voting and Presidential succession), and still other flaws that have not yet been fixed (such as about equal rights for women and land-based representation in the Senate), but the point is the same there is absolutely nothing permanently sacrosanct about the Founders and the Constitution. They were deeply flawed people, it was and is a flawed document, and when we think about how to make our country a more perfect union, we must operate with those principles in mind.

In the face of yet another mass shooting, now is the time to acknowledge a profound but obvious truth the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned. We can do that through a Constitutional amendment. It's been done before (when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed prohibition in the Eighteenth), and it must be done now.

The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact. When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized.

Sure, the Founders knew that the world evolved and that technology changed, but the weapons of today that are easily accessible are vastly different than anything that existed in 1791. When the Second Amendment was written, the Founders didn't have to weigh the risks of one man killing 49and injuring 53 all by himself. Now we do, and the risk-benefit analysis of 1791 is flatly irrelevant to the risk-benefit analysis of today.

Gun-rights advocates like to make this all about liberty, insisting that their freedom to bear arms is of utmost importance and that restricting their freedom would be a violation of basic rights.

But liberty is not a one way street. It also includes the liberty to enjoy a night out with friends, loving who you want to love, dancing how you want to dance, in a club that has historically provided a refuge from the hate and fear that surrounds you. It also includes the liberty to go to and send your kids to kindergarten and first grade so that they can begin to be infused with a love of learning. It includes the liberty to go to a movie, to your religious house of worship, to college, to work, to an abortion clinic, go to a hair salon, to a community center, to the supermarket, to go anywhere and feel that you are free to do to so without having to weigh the risk of being gunned downby someone wielding a weapon that can easily kill you and countless others.

The liberty of some to own guns cannot take precedence over the liberty of everyone to live their lives free from the risk of being easily murdered. It has for too long, and we must now say no more.

Finally, if we take the gun-rights lobby at their word, the Second Amendment is a suicide pact. As they say over and over, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In other words, please the gun manufacturers by arming even the vast majority of Americans who do not own a gun.

Just think of what would have happened in the Orlando night-club Saturday night if there had been many others armed. In a crowded, dark, loud dance club, after the shooter began firing, imagine if others took out their guns and started firing back. Yes, maybe they would have killed the shooter, but how would anyone else have known what exactly was going on? How would it not have devolved into mass confusion and fear followed by a large-scale shootout without anyone knowing who was the good guy with a gun, who was the bad guy with a gun, and who was just caught in the middle? The death toll could have been much higher if more people were armed.

The gun-rights lobby's mantra that more people need guns will lead to an obvious result more people will be killed. We'd be walking down a road in which blood baths are a common occurrence, all because the Second Amendment allows them to be.

At this point, bickering about the niceties of textual interpretation, whether the history of the amendment supports this view or that, and how legislators can solve this problem within the confines of the constitution is useless drivel that will lead to more of the same. We need a mass movement of those who are fed up with the long-dead Founders' view of the world ruling current day politics. A mass movement of those who will stand up and say that our founding document was wrong and needs to be changed. A mass movement of those who will thumb their nose at the NRA, an organization that is nothing more than the political wing of the country's gun manufacturers, and say enough is enough.

The Second Amendment must be repealed, and it is the essence of American democracy to say so.

Watch four pro-gun arguments we're sick of hearing.

See the article here:
Why It's Time to Repeal the Second Amendment

If you think the Supreme Court is poised to expand or restrict gun rights sometime soon, don't hold your breath.

As handwringing continues over what might have prevented the Orlando massacre-- an old-time filibuster sparked by it even broke outin the Senate on Wednesday -- the justices are about to consider a state gun control law enacted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

According to its docket, the court on Thursday will weigh whether to take up Shew v. Malloy, a case with all the elements that could make it emblematic for the battle over the Second Amendment's meaning.

It's a dispute between a host of gun rights groups, businesses and individual gun owners against Connecticut over the constitutionality of a sweeping regulatory regime that bans so-called "assault weapons" -- semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines of the very sort used in Newtown and Orlando.

Back in October, an appeals court in Manhattan said the Connecticut law and a similarly restrictive law in New Yorkwere constitutional --and the plaintiffs vowed to take the battle to the Supreme Court.

Tom King, the head of New York's biggest gun rights group, even said he was "happy" to have lost the case because that meant his organization could now ask the highest court of the land to decide the issue once and for all.

Brendan McDermid / Reuters

But then Justice Antonin Scalia died. And suddenly,the gun lobby's calculations changed -- including King's, who told the New York Daily News weeks after Scalia's death that it was "just the wrong time" to continue the fight in the absence of a reliable conservative vote at the Supreme Court.

That might explain why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) glowingly pointed to the National Rifle Association's opposition to Merrick Garland, the president's high court nominee, to rationalize his own refusal to hold a vote and a hearing for Garland.

None of this matters, and yet it matters a great deal.

Because despite the pleas from gun rights advocates who still want the Supreme Court to take up the challenge to the weapons ban, the justices could wield all kinds of reasons not to touch the case with a 10-foot pole.

It's not that they aren't interested in clarifying the scope of the Second Amendment in the wake of Scalia's magnum opus in District of Columbia v. Heller, which for the first time recognized a fundamental right to gun ownership in the home. But to echo King, it's just not the right time -- not with a short-staffed Supreme Court, a volatile political environment, and a nomination fight that may very well continue after President Barack Obama's successor takes office.

As things stand now, all signs point to an extremely quiet and uncontroversial Supreme Court term beginning next October -- a dry season that will stand in stark contrast to the current term's constitutional blockbusters on affirmative action, abortion and immigration, to name only a few.The court just isn't taking many new cases.

This paucity of potential big decisions aside, the courthassent some signals that the Second Amendment is safe, even as it has rejected dozens of cases challenging gun control measures across the country, leaving lower courts as the final decision-makers.

Over the protest of Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court refused in December to review an appeals court decision that effectively upheld an assault weapons ban in a small Illinois town. Thomas said that decision treated the Second Amendment as a second-class right.

But in March, a month after Scalia's death, the justices tipped their hand the other way, ruling that a Massachusetts ban on stun guns may violate the right to bear arms, quietly but forcefully endorsing the late justice's Heller decision.

The Second Amendment extends ... to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding," the court said in a very brief rulingthat no justice signed his or her name to.

But writing separately, Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito said they would have gone further, asserting that indeed, gun ownership for self-defense is a "fundamental right" while making clear that Americans' safety shouldn't be "left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming the people than about keeping them safe."

Fighting words, as well as fodder for debate about where the court may go next on guns.

It is precisely this seeming tension within the Supreme Court -- plus the political fallout from Scalia's vacancy and all the work that other courts are doing to make some sense of the Second Amendment -- that indicates why the justices probably won't pull the trigger on the next big gun rights case soon.

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Don't Bank On The Supreme Court To Clarify The Second ...

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Link:
Second Amendment | Fox News

In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States decided in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects a civilian's right to keep a gun in his home. In 2010, the court decided in McDonald v. Chicago that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the power of state and local governments to outlaw the possession of handguns by private citizens. The vote in each case was five-to-four not exactly a ringing endorsement of the court's reasoning in either case. But for now, the law of the land with regard to easy access to guns is settled.

The Second Amendment is enthroned mistakenly, but as a matter of law as a fundamental dimension of individual freedom. The practical result is that we must live with carnage by firearms as a daily fact of American life.

Surely, the timid voices of reason and humanity whisper, there is some limit to the atrocities that Americans will tolerate. When Adam Lanza, with no prior criminal history nor treatment for mental illness, killed 26 people including 20 first-grade students at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on December 14, 2012, the nation was riveted and horrified. Something this unspeakable, this ghastly, this straight-out-of-hell, changed exactly nothing in federal law.

Then, in June of this year, a gunman killed nine churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. Two months later, a Virginia TV news crew was slaughtered on air, and the deed posted almost immediately to social media by the killer. And Thursday, a gunman killed at least 9 people and wounded others on the campus of Oregon's Umpqua Community College.

What will it take to shock us out of our torpor? Another dead president? Not likely half the country will applaud it. How about a dozen people inspired by ISIS slipping simultaneously into the Mall of America and unveiling the assault weapons they have obtained in perfectly legal ways? I cannot imagine what level of gun violence will serve more to horrify than to entertain.

It is certainly a respectable idea to accept the Second Amendment and treat death by firearms as a public health issue. It is doomed to fail, however, because it isn't the criminal or the psychotic who produces the murder, it's the easy means to act out one's fantasies that produces the criminal and the psychotic. Millions of guns, thousands of gun deaths.

Retired Justice John Paul Stevens, the leading dissenter in Heller and McDonald, has published a wise little book, "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution." He suggests five words be added to the Second Amendment so that it reads "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed."

I say, let's get rid of the Second Amendment altogether. Let the states and Congress regulate firearms as they see fit. Some states, most of them without big-city violence, will retain laws that allow citizens to carry concealed firearms. Gang-ridden Chicago will try again to crack down on guns. Congress will reconsider universal background checks and the prohibition of assault weapons.

As Justice Stevens informs us in his book, "legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good."

And we've all already seen enough harm.

Hal Riedl retired from the Maryland Division of Correction in 2010, and from the office of the state's attorney for Baltimore City in December 2014. His email is halriedl@msn.com.

Originally posted here:
Repeal the Second Amendment - Baltimore Sun

Participants consoling each other during a candlelight vigil for the nine people who were killed in a shooting at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon, on Thursday. The gunman also was killed. Credit photograph by Rich Pedroncelli/AP

The tragedy happensyesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will againexactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the Presidenthis growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mournerhas now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measlesnot perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that its been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party wont allow that to change, and the partywont allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns.

In the course of todays conversation, two issues may come up, treated in what is now called a trolling tonepretending to show concern but actually standing in the way of real argument. One is the issue of mental health and this particular killers apparent religious bigotry. Everyone crazy enough to pick up a gun and kill many people is crazy enough to have an ideology to attach to the act. The pointthe only pointis that, everywhere else, that person rants in isolation or on his keyboard; only in America do we cheerfully supply him with military-style weapons to express his rage. As the otherwise reliably Republican (but still Canadian-raised) David Frum wisely writes: Every mass shooter has his own hateful motive. They all use the same tool.

More standard, and seemingly more significant, is the claimoften made by those who say they recognize the tragedy of mass shootings and pretend, at least, that they would like to see gun sanity reign in Americathat the Second Amendment acts as a barrier to anything like the gun laws, passed after mass shootings, that have saved so many lives in Canada and Australia. Like it or not, according to this argument, the Constitution limits our ability to control the number and kinds of guns in private hands. Even the great Jim Jeffries, in his memorable standup on American madness, says, Why cant you change the Second Amendment? Its an amendment!as though further amending it were necessary to escape it.

In point of historical and constitutional fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the only amendment necessary for gun legislation, on the local or national level, is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can be summed up in a sentence: if the Founders hadnt wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase well regulated in the amendment. (A quick thought experiment: What if those words were not in the preamble to the amendment and a gun-sanity group wanted to insert them? Would the National Rifle Association be for or against this change? Its obvious, isnt it?)

The confusion is contemporary. (And, let us hope, temporary.) It rises from the younger-than-springtime decision D.C. v. Heller, from 2008, when Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 54 majority, insisted that, whether he wanted it to or not, the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own a weapon. (A certain disingenuous show of disinterestedness is typical of his opinions.)

This was an astounding constitutional reading, or misreading, as original as Citizens United, and as idiosyncratic as the reasoning in Bush v. Gore, which found a conclusive principle designed to be instantly discardedor, for that matter, as the readiness among the courts right wing to overturn a health-care law passed by a supermajority of the legislature over a typo. Anyone who wants to both grasp that decisions radicalism and get a calm, instructive view of what the Second Amendment does say, and was intended to say, and was always before been understood to say, should read Justice John Paul Stevenss brilliant, persuasive dissent in that case. Every person who despairs of the sanity of the country should read it, at least once, not just for its calm and irrefutable case-making but as a reminder of what sanity sounds like.

Stevens, a Republican judge appointed by a Republican President, brilliantly analyzes the history of the amendment, making it plain that for Scalia, et al., to arrive at their view, they have to reference not the deliberations that produced the amendment but, rather, bring in British common law and lean on interpretations that arose long after the amendment was passed. Both keep arms and bear arms, he demonstrates, were, in the writers day, military terms used in military contexts. (Gary Wills has usefully illuminated this truth in the New York Review of Books.) The intent of the Second Amendment, Stevens explains, was obviously to secure to the people a right to use and possess arms in conjunction with service in a well-regulated militia. The one seemingly sound argument in the Scalia decisionthat the people in the Second Amendment ought to be the same people referenced in the other amendments, that is, everybodyis exactly the interpretation that the preamble was meant to guard against.

Stevenss dissent should be read in full, but his conclusion in particular is clear and ringing:

The right the Court announces [in Heller] was not enshrined in the Second Amendment by the Framers; it is the product of todays law-changing decision. . . . Until today, it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the civilian use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia. The Courts announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes upsets that settled understanding . . .

Justice Stevens and his colleagues were not saying, a mere seven years ago, that the gun-control legislation in dispute in Heller alone was constitutional within the confines of the Second Amendment. They were asserting that essentially every kind of legislation concerning guns in the hands of individuals was compatible with the Second Amendmentindeed, that regulating guns in individual hands was one of the purposes for which the amendment was offered.

So there is no need to amend the Constitution, or to alter the historical understanding of what the Second Amendment meant. No new reasoning or tortured rereading is needed to reconcile the Constitution with common sense. All that is necessary for sanity to rule again, on the question of guns, is to restore the amendment to its commonly understood meaning as it was articulated by this wise Republican judge a scant few years ago. And all you need for that is one saner and, in the true sense, conservative Supreme Court vote. One Presidential election could make that happen.

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Read more from the original source:
The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment