A few months ago I wrote a blog in which I proposed repealing the Second Amendment.[1]
Nobody cared much.
A few weeks later Bret Stephens, a neo-conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote[2] the same thing. It was the New York Times, so a few more people cared.
But now retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has written a column[3] in the Times also calling for repeal of the Second Amendment — and this may have started a serious national debate on that question.
No, I’m not saying I started it all. What I am saying is that when people from a former Supreme Court Justice to a middle-of-the-road national columnist to an obscure liberal blogger in the Midwest start talking about this, it is on the cusp of seriously entering the national conversation about guns.
And this is nothing but very good. For decades the National Rifle Association has been wildly successful by being extreme and unreasonable. And because the group opposes even the mildest gun restrictions, under the false notion that the Second Amendment protects every kind of mass gun slaughter, reasonable people don’t even bother to propose really strong and meaningful gun regulations. Gun control advocates ask for crumbs[4], and each crumb is angrily portrayed as stealing the silverware off the table.
Which is why I’ve long felt that we need to pull the national conversation about guns in the opposite direction by being extreme on the gun-control side of this issue. Or more to the point, being apparently extreme in the context of the insane parameters of this debate in the U.S.
Look, no other country has enshrined gun ownership in their constitution the way we have. And lots of other countries have strong or stronger democracies than we do. The paranoid notion among gun extremists that somehow their other freedoms depend on their firearms is just that: sick and paranoid. The Republicans are right that we do need more mental health treatment, and we should start with those so delusional that they imagine they’ll be defending American democracy with their hunting rifle. If it ever got to that point, American democracy and anything we would recognize as our country itself would have been long gone.
What we do have in America is not just mass shootings, but a death rate from firearms that is off the map compared to any other developed nation. Gun homicide rates[5] are 25 times higher than the average of other developed nations. And there is only one plausible reason for that: There are just too many damn guns out there. With just five percent of the world’s population, we own half of the estimated 650 million guns[6] owned by civilians worldwide and we have
