Rolling Stone Mag: It’s Time to Repeal the Second Amendment

The main point of Cohen’s article is that it is time not only to disarm the law-abiding public, but to cancel the 2nd Amendment. Before Cohen gets into that, however, the professor, who claims he teaches Constitutional law as his coursework, spends time denigrating the venerable document and showing why he thinks it was deeply flawed and the founding fathers inept and ignorant. You have to be one arrogant SOB to take a position like that, and you have to wonder how and why a guy would be a teacher of the Constitution if that is his opinion.

And that, in a nutshell is the problem with education and the students coming out of the universities and law schools today. They have idiot, far left nut jobs teaching that the Constitution is deeply flawed, the writers and founding fathers inept and morally corrupt, and the nation a racist, misogynistic, homophobic mess. Come to think of it, Obama taught Constitutional law and that was his opinion.

Be that as it may, Cohen then says it is time to spruce up the raggedy Constitution, flawed as it is, and get rid of the right of citizens to bear arms. You can bet that the rights of free speech and freedom of religion will be next to go, but for now the prof has to quickly trade on the tragedy of 50 dead people while the news is fresh in order to make his point. He says:

I teach the Constitution for a living. I revere the document when it is used to further social justice and make our country a more inclusive one. I admire the Founders for establishing a representative democracy that has survived for over two centuries.

But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong. This is one of those times. We need to say loud and clear: The Second Amendment must be repealed.

As much as we have a culture of reverence for the founding generation, it’s important to understand that they got it wrong — and got it wrong often. Unfortunately, in many instances, they enshrined those faults in the Constitution. For instance, most people don’t know it now, but under the original document, Mitt Romney would be serving as President Obama’s vice president right now because he was the runner-up in the last presidential election. That part of the Constitution was fixed by the Twelfth Amendment, which set up the system we currently have of the president and vice president running for office together.

Much more profoundly, the Framers and the Constitution were wildly wrong on race. They enshrined slavery into the Constitution in multiple ways, including taking the extreme step of prohibiting the Constitution from being amended to stop the slave trade in the country’s first 20 years. They also blatantly wrote racism into the Constitution by counting slaves as only 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation. It took a bloody civil war to fix these constitutional flaws (and then another 150 years, and counting, to try to fix the societal consequences of them).

It seems that the professor does not know his history either and had to criticize the 3/5 plan, which was simply a means of getting all of the colonies to become part of the larger country before they could address who was and was not a citizen. Revisionist history is fun, you don’t have to include context, and you can make wild assertions without having to back them up.

There are others flaws that have been fixed (such as about voting and Presidential succession), and still other flaws that have not yet been fixed (such as about equal rights for women and land-based representation in the Senate), but the point is the same — there is absolutely nothing permanently sacrosanct about the Founders and the Constitution. They were deeply flawed people, it was and is a flawed document, and when we think about how to make our country a more perfect union, we must operate with those principles in mind.

The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact. When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized.

Gun-rights advocates like to make this all about liberty, insisting that their freedom to bear arms is of utmost importance and that restricting their freedom would be a violation of basic rights.

Just think of what would have happened in the Orlando night-club Saturday night if there had been many others armed. In a crowded, dark, loud dance club, after the shooter began firing, imagine if others took out their guns and started firing back. Yes, maybe they would have killed the shooter, but how would anyone else have known what exactly was going on? How would it not have devolved into mass confusion and fear followed by a large-scale shootout without anyone knowing who was the good guy with a gun, who was the bad guy with a gun, and who was just caught in the middle? The death toll could have been much higher if more people were armed.

I’m sure there is some logic hidden in this scenario, I am just having a hard time finding it. If some of the other patrons in the bar had been armed, Cohen asserts they not only could not have stopped the shooter, they would have all shot each other because of the confusion and noise? This guy has spent way too much time watching Quentin Tarantino movies. How about if this bar had allowed people to carry concealed weapons, and five or ten people actually did, the shooter would probably have picked a different location to attack because he could not have been sure he wouldn’t be shot in the first 10 seconds of his shooting spree?

The gun-rights lobby’s mantra that more people need guns will lead to an obvious result — more people will be killed. We’d be walking down a road in which blood baths are a common occurrence, all because the Second Amendment allows them to be.

The Second Amendment must be repealed, and it is the essence of American democracy to say so.

There is no shortage of nut jobs calling for the unconstitutional prohibition of guns. One gun confiscation advocate was recently calling for a National State of Emergency to do the deed in order to circumvent Congress in the decision. You can read that as circumventing the will of the people, by the way. That does not bother these anti-gun folks, and in fact, this anti-gun fanatic, who applauds Obama’s efforts to disarm the nation, was given time on CNN to make his rants.

At this point, what more can be said? It is clear that over the last seven years under Obama, gun sales have sky rocketed, yet gun violence has not risen apace. There is no correlation between the availability of guns and gun violence, only of fanatical anti-gun Democrats who see a political issue to use as a wedge.  The Second Amendment is still more or less well respected except for in places like California, Chicago, and Washington D.C. where gun control is in full force and the murder rate is dramatically higher than in places where open carry and concealed carry permits are common place. There are plenty of guns, but there are not blood baths on the side of the road. There are also tens of thousands of examples where guns have, in fact, saved a potential victim and prevented harm or a tragedy because the potential victim was well armed. The better choice, then, is to keep the Second Amendment enshrined in law and to repeal the professor.

Source: rollingstone.com

Photo: The Buried Life