Justice Stevens’s Second Amendment Pipe Dream

By Stephen Halbrook
National Review
April 18th. 2018



Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, now retired, gave gun-control advocates false hope recently when he advocated repeal of the Second Amendment. Justice Stevens knows, or should know, that it can’t happen — not because the National Rifle Association is so powerful, but because 44 of the 50 states have enshrined the right to keep and bear arms in their constitutions, and it takes a vote of three-fourths of the states to approve any change in the U.S. Constitution. You do the math.

Writing in the New York Times on March 27, Stevens suggested that gun-control advocates should not just call for a ban on semiautomatic firearms, but should “demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.” Despite its reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” the amendment was never meant to place “any limit” on gun restrictions, Stevens claimed.

The Supreme Court, as Stevens also knows, ruled otherwise in District of Columbia v. Heller (200, holding that “the people” means actual individuals. Yet Stevens naïvely suggested that “overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple.”