See What This Supreme Court Justice Has to Say About the Second Amendment!

• Steve
• March 27, 2018
• 0 Comment
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Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is not holding back.  In an opinion piece for the New York Times, the retired Justice flat out says repeal the second amendment.  His reasoning behind this essentially is to neutralize the NRA and their strangle hold on legislators like Mitch McConnell and even Donald Trump.

In 2008 the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia vs. Heller which essentially stated that all citizens have a right to bear arms.  The NRA has since taken that decision and waged war on any attempt to regulate guns in the United States.  Former Chief Warren Burger was in direct opposition of this thought process and stated the “NRA was perpetrating the greatest pieces of fraud… on the American Public” he had ever seen, with their campaign against gun control.

With Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate there is no chance of a constitutional conference and repeal of the second amendment.  One could argue that Justice Stevens knows this but said it anyway, but it’s worth stating again, there is absolutely no chance of this happening under the current administration, and would be just as difficult under the next.

Until we actually get the special interest money out of campaigns, we will not see significant reforms in gun control.  See Justice Stevens’ call to “disarm” below.

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.”

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