Repeal the Second Amendment? Uh, No. :: 06/21/2022

“There’s no way to fix the Second Amendment. Let’s just get rid of it.”

That’s the headline of a recent op-ed published by CNN. It was written by Bill Press, an obviously unserious progressive who many years ago cohosted the network’s popular left-right debate program, “Crossfire.” (Hey, it could’ve been worse; it could’ve been an incoherent anti-2A screed by, say, Michael Moore.)

Press indicates early on that he’s not quite of sound mind. He calls the Uvalde massacre of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers an “assassination” — as if there were a political or religious rationale for the rampage of an 18-year-old madman. He then tosses out the old canard of the Republican Party being in the pocket of the NRA, as opposed to simply in touch with its constituents. “There’s no way,” he writes, “especially in this election year, that Republicans will let anything out of the Senate that would ruffle the feathers of the National Rifle Association.”

He nonsensically calls the originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment “a con job” and “a license to kill as many people as you want with as many guns as you want.” That’s rubbish, of course. The Second Amendment was drafted and envisioned as the guarantor of all our other God-given rights. Or, as Justice Joseph Story, James Madison’s lone Supreme Court appointee, called it, “the palladium of the liberties of a republic” — that amendment which “offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.”

The Second Amendment wasn’t envisioned as a hunting license or as a means of protecting oneself or one’s family and possessions against predators (although it can certainly be that). And no one should be under the idiotic impression that it’s a “license to kill.” No, the Second Amendment was meant to be our last line of defense against the encroachments of an out-of-control state.

Press, though, can’t imagine such a thing as a government run amok. He thus puts forth his solution: “The only effective way to deal with the Second Amendment is to repeal it — and then replace it with something that makes sense in a civilized society.”

As if to bolster his case, Press invokes a now-deceased former Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, who in March 2018 wrote an op-ed in the wake of another school massacre by another deranged young man at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Stevens said that those who protested against the shooting “should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”

Stevens explained: “A constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

“Simple”?

Apparently, neither Press nor Stevens understands how our Constitution works — which is remarkable, given that Stevens spent most of his adult life interpreting that document. But our Founders knew what they were doing when they made the Constitution highly resistant to the whims of the day. Amending that document is the heaviest of lifts, requiring a vote by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Can anyone imagine supermajorities in both the House and Senate doing so? That’d be 292 votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate. And can anyone imagine the citizens of 38 states going along with it?

Good luck repealing the Second Amendment.

Press, perhaps realizing that the people aren’t going to be convinced into giving up such a fundamental right, then resorts to the last refuge of leftist scoundrels: race. He writes:

As many constitutional scholars and American historians have shown, the Second Amendment was added later by James Madison as part of a deal to secure the support of Patrick Henry and other White racist Virginians for confirmation of the Constitution. Noted academic Carol Anderson, for one, describes the “anti-Blackness” that lies at the heart of the Second Amendment in her book “The Second,” as well as its “architecture of repression.”

This 2A revisionism is the sleaziest part of the Democrats’ ongoing efforts to foment racial discord via phony charges of white supremacy. The truth, as our Louis DeBroux once wrote, is that gun control has long been racist, not gun rights: “Just as minimum wage laws were originally passed as a way of keeping non-union Southern black laborers from taking jobs from the more expensive, white Northern union labor, gun control laws were passed as a way of disarming blacks so as to leave them defenseless against the attacks of Ku Klux Klan members and other racial supremacist terrorists.”

Summing up: Free people keep and bear arms. Slaves don’t. Which is why our Second Amendment is an essential part of the American bedrock.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/89214-repeal-the-second-amendment-uh-no-2022-06-20