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Four years ago, when — as now — the nation was reeling from the horror of a mass school shooting, a retired Supreme Court justice suggested a radical solution: getting rid of the Second Amendment.
John Paul Stevens issued the call after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. The attack prompted hundreds of thousands to demand action the next month to end gun violence at the
March for Our Lives.
In a March 27, 2018,
New York Times op-ed, Stevens praised the protesters and their call for stricter gun control laws. “But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform,” he wrote, about a year before his
death at 99. “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”
Stevens said the amendment was adopted out of concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the states. “Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century,” he wrote.
An elementary school massacre spurred tighter gun control in the U.K.
He called repeal a “simple but dramatic action [that] would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform” and would make schoolchildren safer.
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But Stevens didn’t acknowledge the herculean challenge that his proposal entailed, as there was (and remains) zero chance that gun control advocates would get anywhere close to the two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states needed for repeal.
Stevens’s proposal didn’t generate a lot of momentum, but it did get pushback from some fellow liberals.
“I admire Justice Stevens but his supposedly ‘simple but dramatic’ step of repealing the 2d Am is AWFUL advice,”
tweeted Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor. “The obstacle to strong gun laws is political, not legal. Urging a politically impossible effort just strengthens opponents of achievable reform.”
Tribe expanded on his argument in a Washington Post op-ed, headlined “
The Second Amendment isn’t the problem.” “The NRA’s strongest rallying cry has been: ‘They’re coming for our beloved Second Amendment,’” he wrote. “Enter Stevens, stage left, boldly calling for the amendment’s demise, thereby giving aid and comfort to the gun lobby’s favorite argument.”
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In his op-ed, Stevens wrote that repeal was necessary to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008
District of Columbia v. Heller ruling that Americans had an individual right to bear arms. He was one of four dissenters in that case.
They were killers with powerful guns. The president went after their weapons.
“For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation,” Stevens wrote in the op-ed.
Republican President Gerald Ford nominated Stevens to the court in 1975, at a time when Supreme Court nominations were not as politicized as they are today. Stevens eventually became one of its most liberal members. Although his 2018 proposal didn’t go anywhere, calls for repeal continue today.
