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Retired SCOTUS Justice Wants To 'Fix' the Second Amendment
CanHasDIY (1672858) writes "In his yet-to-be-released book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens, who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court for 35 years, believes he has the key to stopping the seeming recent spate of mass killings — amend the Constitution to exclude private citizens from armament ownership. Specifically, he recommends adding 5 words to the 2nd Amendment, so that it would read as follows: 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.'
What I find interesting is how Stevens maintains that the Amendment only protects armament ownership for those actively serving in a state or federal military unit, in spite of the fact that the Amendment specifically names 'the People' as a benefactor (just like the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth) and of course, ignoring the traditional definition of the term militia. I'm personally curious about his other 5 suggested changes, but I guess we'll have to wait until the end of April to find out."
What I find interesting is how Stevens maintains that the Amendment only protects armament ownership for those actively serving in a state or federal military unit, in spite of the fact that the Amendment specifically names 'the People' as a benefactor (just like the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth) and of course, ignoring the traditional definition of the term militia. I'm personally curious about his other 5 suggested changes, but I guess we'll have to wait until the end of April to find out."
In addition the weapons industry did not have a rich and powerful lobbying group called the "NRA" working for them.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
By this argument, we need to strengthen our right to openly carry swords and nunchaku.
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You're supposed to butcher a dead animal. The 2nd Amendment as it is currently understood is dead. It serves no purpose except to satisfy gun nuts. You're living in a developed country with a standing army, police forces, and all of the evidence makes plain that owning a gun is more of a threat to the gun owner and his family than it is to any criminals or gubmint agents. People who are obsessed with gun ownership are unhinged and we should stop taking them seriously. Get something else to prove to the world how big your reproductive organs are, something that isn't used to kill.
This amendment needs to go away, and the huge numbers of guns among the populace need to be destroyed. There's no reason for Americans to be armed to the teeth. Australia did it, so can we.
Since Guns kill people, and modern guns kill a lot of people easily and are far easier to use, it's not a fair comparison to the press.
You are using a strawman, stop it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Point of order: the NRA is nowhere near as rich as the weapons industry. If every single civilian weapon sale in the US stopped today, and the NRA was dissolved, the small arms industry in the US would still be a multibillion dollar industry feeding off our military budgets.
I'm only bringing this up because your post is structured in a way such as to imply the NRA is the big fish here. Functionally speaking, the NRA essentially acts like an arm of the republican party, favoring republican candidates regardless of substantive firearm policy positions. And they represent a sub-group of diehard republican voters. Their main leverage exists in the republican primaries, which, in turn, drives national priorities towards ultra-right, but not rightward in general. It's kind of a curious artifact.
I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context -- most humans have trouble figuring out what the person across the table from them intends, at least without significant interactive discussion.
But more importantly, why do we care what people hundreds of years ago *intended* or even what they *wrote*? What makes them so special? Why don't we get to choose our constitution in the same way they did? They took only a couple of years to add a whole slew of amendments -- why aren't we entitled to do the same, even if our choices now are contrary to their intent at the time?
That would actually make the amendment read as it should and remove the incorrect assumption that everyone has the right to own guns. The problem with citizen gun ownership is that most citzens dont have the self control, maturity or intelligence to handle a gun correctly.
The lesson of Nevada is that there are self entitled people who don't realize that they belong to a country. This guy only had grazing rights because the feds allowed it in the first place. Since he is not a native American then the land he is on is only his through the good will of the federal government. If his cattle were grazing on some other private citizen's land then you could be sure that those cattle would have been removed from the land, possibly shot, and any incursion by the cattle's owner with an accompanying gang of militia onto someone else's land would have been likely met with violence. But instead the land he's tresspassing on is the fed's land so that makes it ok to the anarchists.