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 We need to say loud and clear: The Second Amendment must be repealed.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.
They should stick to making up more rape stories and leave the Constitutional subjects to adults.
Democrats and RINOs should be banned.
pure ignorance
We will only be safe when govt and criminals and terrorists and the elites’ armed security have the guns.
Yup, I feel safer just reading that.
As soon as they repeal the 1st Amendment, you can have the 2nd, and 3rd, and 4th, and 5th,.........
Yet another ultra-liberal Jew who, if born at an earlier time and in the wrong country, would have led his people into the gas chambers.
Professor of Law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University. Here’s his bio; note that he checks all the liberal, social justice boxes:
http://drexel.edu/law/faculty/fulltime_fac/David%20Cohen/
Only folks with uniforms and badges should have guns..wait, Omar had a uniform and badge.
Exactly. I am so sick of these pukes who sit behind their gates communities with security and what not and write this garbage.
The Founders got it wrong??? ... WTF do you know! You filthy rotten KAPO. You are the type of person who would gladly walk the women and children to the "showers" and then come back and kiss and lick the boots of your Nazi masters.
David S. Cohen
Guess that puts him in the same league as yet another “constitutional law professor”, Barrack Hussein Obama.
OK, let's get this over with. I'll even draft the amendment and ask my Senator to introduce it.
A Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
Section 1. The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of firearms within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for personal defense, target practice, competition, and all other previously allowed purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 4. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress. Should this article fail ratification, it may not be considered by Congress again until 100 years from the date of its submission to the States.
Let's get it on! I'm SURE getting 2/3 of each House of Congress and 38 states to ratify this will present NO problems!
Abortion. Never mentioned in the constitution. State laws declared it illegal and murder for hundreds of years. Only 40+ short years ago declared constitutional right by kangaroo court. Liberals declare it settled law.
2nd Amendment. Given its own amendment to guarantee the protection of this inalienable right to self defense of the nation and individuals. If you cant defend your country you canot defend yourself as individuals will be the ones defending the country. Logically impossible to say you can only defend your country, but not your own life and property.
Somehow this law, that has been around 6 times as long as the illicit abortion decree, is not settled law. This one they try to take away. Tyrants disarm citizens. Disarmed citizens die by the millions at the hands of their enlightened governments.
Our supposed guys on our side say zero in response. They are complicit by omission for not doing their sworn oaths to protect and defend the constitution.
The Rolling Stone. The rag that tried to make Dzhokhar Tsarvaev a rock star.
Better yet, folks with a history of expressing such UN-American values need to be STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to move to a country with values that are in alignment with theirs.
I hope these people are just evil. If they are evil and also as stupid as the author pretends, they are even more dangerous than ordinary evil. Some petty tyrant with an insatiable lust for power would eventually use those oblivious evil people for his (her?) own ends.
They cannot amend the Constitution to remove our individual, God-given right to self-defense, a right that includes keeping and bearing arms. First, that natural right comes from God, a higher power than Rolling Stone or even Obama. Second, amendments to the Constitution are only valid when, “ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States”. Considering that most state are rural, “flyover country”, and conservative, that will never happen.
Also, just as people overwhelmingly ignored prohibition in the 1920s and drug laws later, decent people would overwhelmingly ignore gun laws such as New York’s “Safe Act” and anything more strict than that. The far-left thugs cannot disarm free men, and they cannot take our freedom so long as we are armed.
This moron actually used the phrase “Social Justice” and Constitution in the same sentence.
Couldn’t read beyond first 2 sentences, which clearly signify this guy is a cultural Marxist who hates America and favors law fare as a means to destroy it.
This guy has no business teaching the Constitution.
The Constitution is built on the assumption that people have an innate, God given respect for morality, and a general consensus on the difference between right and wrong, and the secular law’s basis in Natural law.
The constitution was NEVER intended to be “used” to further misnomered notions of forced equality (”social justice”) imposed from a totalitarian, top-heavy government.
Nor was the Constitution ever intended to be “used” to blur or eradicate the distinctions between American culture and that of the rest of the world, forcing “inclusivity” of everyone and everything, without regard for right and wrong, or even our own safety and survival.
Well, Mr. Constitution-Teacher, the procedure for repeal is right there in the Constitution. If it’s such a great idea, get busy. Lots of drippy words, nothing more.
1) All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.
2) Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
There are a few more that could be added, but that's a start. The first replacement should dispel a lot of the nonsense we hear from liberals about what the 2nd amendment means.
Mr. Cohen should take another toke and get back to reading Rolling Stone instead of promulgating his foolish ideas.
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