Talking points
Second Amendment: Stevens’ call for repeal
“Progressives are finally coming clean,” said Kyle Smith in the National Review—they really do want to take your guns. When retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for a repeal of the Second Amendment in a New York Times op-ed last week, he was speaking for the Democratic Party’s “fervent base.” Usually, progressives couch their demands for gun restrictions carefully, claiming they support the right to own weapons for selfdefense. But now Stevens has told the truth about the Left’s extremism, and conservatives should thank him. While they rarely admit it, “guns and gun culture appall most liberals,” said Jonathan Tobin in The Federalist. And in the aftermath of Parkland, their “coyness about the Second Amendment may change.”
Stevens “has handed the gun lobby a rhetorical howitzer,” said Laurence Tribe in The Washington Post. For years the NRA has blocked gun-control measures by falsely insisting that any regulation is the gateway to total prohibition. Now here comes Stevens to give “aid and comfort to the gun lobby’s favorite argument.” That’s not the only way Stevens is playing into the gun lobby’s hands, said Matthew Yglesias in Vox.com. To say the Second Amendment must be repealed is to “falsely imply that the existing text and precedents don’t allow for sensible gun control.” In reality, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress and the states can outlaw “dangerous and unusual” weapons, and has let stand a wide variety of state laws, including bans on assault-style rifles and large magazines. Meanwhile, the odds of repealing the amendment—which would require the support of 38 states—are nil. To declare it as an aim “simply sets up the gun-control movement for failure.”
Still, Stevens deserves credit for understanding how our system is supposed to work, said Jonah Goldberg in the New York Post. The retired justice “seeks to change the meaning of the Constitution in the way the Founders intended: through the amendment process,” not by finding some new, trendy meaning in a “living and breathing” Constitution. Americans banned slavery and gave women the right to vote through constitutional amendments, after long, fierce national debates. If liberals would prefer to have Europe’s gun laws, as most would, they should try to amend the Constitution. It would be hard, but “difficulty is a feature, not a bug.”