This commentary is by Jim Sullivan of North Bennington, who retired recently from a career in regional planning and development in Vermont. He owns a semiautomatic shotgun, used for hunting.
“Repeal the Second Amendment” — words that, unfortunately, are never spoken by any politician regardless of ideological leaning, whether after a mass shooting, the death of an innocent child slain in a drive-by shooting, a tragic suicide facilitated by easy access to a handgun, or another insidious court ruling that makes it more, rather than less, likely for these incidents to continue.
And yet repeal is just what should happen to this anachronistic byproduct of an 18th-century effort to avoid the need to raise and fund a federal army.
To be clear, repeal would not result in confiscation of guns or a general prohibition on gun sales, but would finally remove what has become an intractable barrier to sensible regulation. The appropriate political response to the ongoing American carnage should simply be, “I support responsible gun ownership and regulation, so let’s repeal the Second Amendment and get to work.”
As a point of beginning, everyone needs to reread the actual text of the Second Amendment, which states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The historical record is clear that the original intent is plainly stated in the first clause of the amendment; that is, to allow for the ready formation of local and state militias to defend the new nation and, in effect, to avoid the costly challenge of sustaining a standing federal army. With current federal military spending at over $700 billion per year (conservatively), that horse is long out of the barn.
The civilized world looks on in uncomprehending shock and pity as gun-related deaths in the United States continue to soar — to over 45,000 (that is over 120 per day, every day) in 2020. In nearly all “first world” countries, including our neighbor Canada, the gun-related death rate is five to ten times lower than in the U.S. None of those countries are so lacking in common-sense gun regulation as is our own, with none having a constitutional provision that, at least according to the increasingly politicized U.S. Supreme Court, protects an individual’s nearly unrestricted right to wield a deadly weapon.
One way to understand the banality of recent court decisions that have blocked responsible gun regulations is to consider the following thought experiment. What if the founders, in their great wisdom, had thought to include in the Bill of Rights an amendment stating that “Personal mobility, being necessary for the common good, the right of people to horsepower driven conveyance shall not be infringed”? Apparently, given the perverted “originalism” doctrine of recent court rulings, no level of government would be able to require basic competency testing, licensing, or registration for owning or operating a car (modern vehicles being as similar to the horse and buggies of the 18th century as contemporary assault rifles are to the flintlock muskets in use when the Bill of Rights was adopted).
Although the drafters of the Constitution and Bill of Rights made some historically bad decisions (for example, authorizing slavery and denying the right to vote to a majority of adult Americans), they did realize that times and conditions change and, as a result, a method for amending this guiding document would be needed.
And while the nation’s polarizing rhetoric has made it increasingly difficult to carry through on the amendment process, the Second Amendment is even more ripe for repeal now than the 18th Amendment (the one that instituted Prohibition) was when it was repealed in 1933.
Indeed, historically and logically perverse decisions regarding firearm regulation by highly politicized courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, illustrate the need to sweep the Second Amendment into the dustbin of history. Only then can the path to sensible gun legislation, protecting the right to bear arms and the safety of the citizenry, be assured.
