Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens becomes one of the nation’s top government officials to ever say the Second Amendment is no longer necessary.
Pointing to the Parkland student survivors and all those demonstrating for gun control, Justice Stevens writes there is “broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.”
But he urges the demonstrators to “seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”
Stevens, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was nominated to the nation’s highest court by President Gerald Ford, a Republican.
“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that ‘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.’ Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century,” Stevens, now 97, writes.
He notes that the infamous 2008 Heller decision, which led to the rampant gun ownership and use today, “was wrong,” and “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”