Posted on 06/14/2016 9:40:20 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
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 We need to say loud and clear: The Second Amendment must be repealed.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 20 years. 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-15 assault 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 49 and 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 down by 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.
This article is just more liberal bs to disarm us and make Clintoon, the president, who killed the second amendment!
Sessions: Clinton is the most anti-Second Amendment candidate ever!
May 22, 2016, 10:01 am
By Rebecca Savransky
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Sunday slammed Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as “the most anti-Second Amendment” presidential candidate the country has ever seen.
Sessions, who endorsed presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, criticized Clinton for saying the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which he said “protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms,” was wrong.
With the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Sessions said the court is now split, 4-4, in its support of the decision.
“She gets in, she will appoint somebody who changes it, and what that means is it’s no longer a personal right to have a gun, but every city, county and state can completely ban firearms in America,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“This would be the greatest reduction of Second Amendment rights since the founding of the Republic.”
Sessions said it was important the American people understand the extent of Clinton’s “radical position” on the issue.
Sessions also called the list of potential Supreme Court nominees Trump released last week a “really fine list” of “accomplished” people.
Eh, they’re consistent at least. They’ve done a de facto repeal of the 1st, choosing which speech is acceptable, seems like a good time to go after the 2nd as well.
I still think the next constitutional amendment should be:
All laws shall apply equally to citizens and government and their employees. Any exemption given to government in any fashion is hereby granted to all citizens. All prohibitions which are applied to citizens are to be immediately applied to all forms of government and employees.
But only then?
-PJ
>>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.
How many has communism killed? How many millions slaughtered by their own government just in the 20th century? By this moron’s logic, we should ban leftists and government. After all, don’t we have the right not to be easily murdered by Khmer Rouge worshiping leftists like this author?
I stopped reading right there. How can he claim any authority on the constitution when he doesn't even realize that the point of making slaves count for 3/5 was specifically to limit the congressional power of slave holding states by making sure they didn't get an inflated house representation? The slave holding states, in case it actually needs to be said, were all pro slavery. So reducing their representation is in effect, an anti slavery move.
So, some left wing ahole writing for the dopper rag “Rolling Stone” wants to repeal our Second Amendment rights?
Screw him.
Yes, the people in the present day have more powerful weapons than they did 200 years ago, but the present day government is far more fascist in 2016, and they have even MORE powerful weapons to oppress and kill we, the people!
Again, screw you, Cohen.
Nothing in the Constitution about homosexual marriage, abortion, or Sodomy but all of that is settled law and that’s that according to the Left.
Riiiiight. The framers were as stoopid as David S. Cohen.
You know what else the framers didn't foresee? They couldn't predict telephones, radio, television, or the internet. Yet, I'll bet little David thinks all those unpredictable methods are entirely within the bounds of the First amendment's provisions for the "press" - which to the framers was a big iron, slow moving machine cranking out scores of copies per day. Movable type, physical pressure - that is precisely what the framers thought of when describing the press.
Unlike little David, the framers weren't stupid enough to believe themselves all-knowing and brilliant.
For someone who claims to teach the Constitution for a living he appears to have no understanding of it or the history and thinking behind what is in it. His thinking on the subject seems limited to leftist memes.
....And no one listens to them!
Talk about an inconvenient truth! Gun control in paris. Very tight. It did nada to stop terrorists.
The Boston bombers bomb was constructed with a pressure cooker. This writer might want to outlaw those also.
The Madrid bombers? I think they were already using banned explosives.
Many other countries do not have the right to bear arms in their constitutions, yet they are subject to terrorist attacks.
Shhh!! Rolling Bones doesn’t want you to think independently or logically!! You are disrupting the force of their propaganda.
I bet there are more than a few relatives in his ancestry who wished there had been a Second Amendment available to them.
He writes crazy but that is what is being taught indirectly and directly for some in the public schools and the universities. That will show up in ever increasing %ages of young people who are horrified that guns are permitted in a “civilized” country. They will be a majority by and by.
And this socialist filth teaches our young what to believe and how to reason: “I revere the document when it is used to further social justice ...” And whom is it that determines what is ‘social justice’? Yup, the socialist fools like this miscreant. Not the Constitution, which contains the Bill of Rights, bilge spittlists like this professor want to cancel.
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.
That is as far as I was willing to go.
Be best if we could just herd up these anti-gun lemmings and send them to ISIS for target practice.
“For starters the Founders established a republic and not a democracy. Not sure how someone who “teaches the Constitution” could get that one wrong.”
The leftists’ god from Kenya (until he needed to run for president) is a self-proclaimed “Constitutional Law Professor” and gets EVERYTHING wrong.
Yeah, Perfesser, get an act of Congress passed with a 2/3rds majority & then get 38 states to ratify it.
Come on, hit the bricks & get ‘er done! Put some teeth in your belief.
The Republic as you surely define it was repealed with the ratification of the 17th Amendment, We became a Democracy at that point. It has taken a long time for that to play out but we did pass quickly through that phase to the current system which is a limited but rapidly expanding Dictatorship.
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