That doesn't require a repeal of the second amendment. That just requires a willingness to interpret the full text of the amendment, instead of focusing only on the last four words.
School shootings are far down the list as far as fatalities go. But that's a poor way to measure the impact of school shootings. The trauma inflicted by each of these events goes way beyond the number of children killed. Everyone who has heard actual gunshots in their own school building feels life-changing trauma.
When a kid in the US says "I'm scared to go to school," you can't tell them they have nothing to be scared of. You can tell them "It's not likely to happen at your school today." That's small comfort.
The full text of the amendment is pretty clear that "a well-regulated militia" depends upon "the right of the people to keep and bear arms", it does not limit that right. In order to train farmers and craftsmen into an effective reserve fighting force, they have to have weapons of their own they can practice with. Times have changed, obviously, and civil society no longer depends on citizen firearm ownership. You can put together a Supreme Court to overturn Heller and other decisions on this issue, but constitutional scholars are likely to consider it rickety jurisprudence.
Repealing the 2nd would be a full-throated declaration that wielding weaponry is a privilege, not a right.
We should probably repeal and replace the First Amendment while we're at it, and tie up some loose ends like Citizens United and the inability of U.S. governments to criminally punish hate speech.
> We should probably repeal and replace the First Amendment while we're at it, and tie up some loose ends like Citizens United and the inability of U.S. governments to criminally punish hate speech.
I am not a gun nut, and have little interest in owning/shooting guns. I've done it, and found it boring. But my defense of the 2nd Amendment is based on the domino theory that if the 2nd can be ignored, there goes the First and every other "inconvenient" right enshrined in the Constitution. The First is the most important of all those Rights.
Thanks for illustrating I am right that the First would be put on the chopping block right after the Second.
There's still freedom of speech in countries with stricter gun laws.
Also in my country prostitution and abortions are legal. So stricter gun laws don't always lead to other restrictions.
There are countries freer than the USA where the government reserves the right to severely restrict speech and even criminalize some forms of political speech, if it serves the public interest. If you express Nazi views in Germany, for instance, you go to jail. Guess what -- Germany hasn't had to deal with a Nazi problem significant enough to turn into a real political movement in nearly 80 years. The USA, by contrast, had a near miss with Hitler 2 actually occupying the White House.
Sorry, but the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go. It should be replaced with a formulation of freedom expression that better balances individual freedom with the public interest according to modern political standards.
In fact, given the problems with corruption in the American system and first-past-the-post voting leading to money-driven, rather than truly democratic, politics, the entire constitution probably needs to be rethought. No less of an American political thinker than Justice Ginsburg has opined that the US constitution is no longer, in the current era, a model for good governance. This should happen in a civilized fashion with a convention and ratification much like the current constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, but it nonetheless needs to happen.
> There are countries freer than the USA where the government reserves the right to severely restrict speech and even criminalize some forms of political speech
No, there aren't.
> the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go
That's the first thing the Nazis did, as well as Mussolini, and every other repressive government. Without free speech, the rest of your rights go down the drain.
If Ginsburg advocated getting rid of free speech, I'd like to see a cite from you about that.
When Ginsburg was interviewed on Al-Hayat TV in 2012 about where the new Egyptian government should look for inspiration, she cited the South African constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Council on Human Rights positively and said "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution" as a model for establishing a new state:
On the matter of free speech, note that the South African and Canadian constitutions, and the ECHR, all protect freedom of expression exclude hate speech as protected speech. It is VERY much in line with modern statecraft to do so, and the doctrinaire approach of the First Amendment (only established in 1969, by the way, before which the USA implemented speech restrictions not dissimilar from those seen elsewhere) is the outlier here. Also note that getting rid of the First Amendment is not getting rid of freedom of expression.
Granted, her position was not even as radical as mine, which is that we must rethink the constitution from the ground up and implement a new form of government more resistant to corruption, again drawing from examples of more modern statecraft -- a multiparty parliamentary system, for instance. All she was saying was that new governments should look elsewhere for a template.
Ginsburg's views that the U.S. constitution is the supreme law of the land, and must be hewed closely to and not played fast and loose with for as long as it is active, were congruent with mine.
Remember, the Constitution was crafted by men of their time, and they explicitly stated it was not a suicide pact and that future generations were fully allowed to amend it should they find the desire. We can probably find a compromise that greatly reduces gun violence, if only compromise could be made.
Since the second amendment doesn’t specify what arms I have the right to bear does that mean I should be allowed to wander down to my local gun store to pick up a surface to air missile so that I can shoot down an airliner? Of course not, that would be insane. So why not put similar limits on automatic weapons that can mow down an auditorium full of kids?
School shootings are far down the list as far as fatalities go. But that's a poor way to measure the impact of school shootings. The trauma inflicted by each of these events goes way beyond the number of children killed. Everyone who has heard actual gunshots in their own school building feels life-changing trauma.
When a kid in the US says "I'm scared to go to school," you can't tell them they have nothing to be scared of. You can tell them "It's not likely to happen at your school today." That's small comfort.