The kids’ March for Life the other day suggests that it may be time to take a fresh look at the Second Amendment, not through the eyes of a polarized public, but through the eyes of those who have actually experienced gun violence.
In 1991 Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative, attacked the Second Amendment, stating that if he were writing the Bill of Rights today, “There wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment,” declaring that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Retired Justice John Stevens, another lifelong Republican, weighed in on the Second Amendment recently in an op/ed piece in the NY Times, stating, “A concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment. Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
Stevens’ point is that when the Constitution was created, in order for the Founders to convince the states to ratify it, they created the first ten amendments to the Constitution, a.k.a. the Bill of Rights, which included the Second Amendment.
At the time, the idea of a standing national army was abhorrent to the states who viewed such an army as a holdover from British rule and a threat to states rights, which at the time was a much more contentious issue than it is today. Stevens added that, “getting 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
