If you’re an American, you’ll know that John Paul Stevens was an Associate Justice in the U.S. Supreme Court, serving from 1975-2010. Although a registered Republican, his decisions put him on the liberal side of the Court.  He’s now 97 years old, but is still fired up (if that’s the right word) about the misconstrual of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  Let us look at Amendment before we read Stevens’s new op-ed in the New York Times (click on screenshot below):

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.

Read it again. The first part gives the rationale for the second, so that the “right to keep and bear Arms” is justified by the need to have a “well regulated Militia”. Militias were quasi-military bodies that the government, in colonial days, used to constitute the armed forces.

For many years, as Stevens notes, the Amendment was interpreted by courts as the government’s having the ability to regulate the possession of arms. That is, the Amendment was construed not as simply allowing Americans to have relatively unrestricted rights to own guns. (For a similar argument, see Garry Wills’s excellent article “To Keep and Bear Arms“, published in 1995 in the New York Review of Books.) Stevens begins by noting the groundswell of support for gun regulation evinced in last Saturday’s demonstrations.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

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.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Ah, how I long for the Burger court. . .

But how things have changed! And they changed for the worse (and seemingly for keeps) with the Supreme Court’s decision a decade ago in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court ruled, by a scant 5-4 margin, that the Second Amendment didn’t need the requirement of a militia: that it gave individuals to have the right to own guns for self defense. (The decision overruled Washington D.C.’s prohibition of handguns and restrictions on rifle storage.)  The majority opinion was written by the odious Antonin Scalia, while Stevens wrote the dissent.

Since then, gun ownership has proliferated, and with it the spate of shootings in nightclubs, schools, and other public places that culminated in last Saturday’s demonstration. The way to cure this, says Stevens, is simply to repeal the ambiguous Second Amendment. Referring to the Heller decision and the Amendment, Stevens argues this:

That [Heller] decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — 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.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

He’s right, for as long as the courts interpret the Second Amendment in the wonky and right-wing way they have, the justification for widespread gun ownership will remain. And there’s no sign that the Court, which is even more conservative now than in Stevens’s Day, will reverse course. The only way to do an end-run around Scalia et al.’s stupid decision is to change the Constitution.

But of course that seems impossible. While there are several ways to amend the Constitution, the usual one is for a proposed amendment to pass both the Senate and the House by a 2/3 vote, and then be ratified by three-quarters of America’s states—all within seven years. (The time limit is why the Equal Rights Amendment, a no-brainer guaranteeing that equal rights couldn’t be abrogated on account of someone’s sex, failed.) Can anyone imagine the Congress even voting to send such an amendment to the States? And can anyone imagine that the ensuing confusion about what would happen with such a repeal would be cleared up before the time limit? And I’m not even taking into account the mouth-foaming, vitriolic, opposition of the National Rifle Association and the power and money it would muster to block such a move.

Stevens’s suggestion is a good one in principle, for it eliminates the Constitutional ambiguities that have led to virtually unrestricted private ownership of guns.  But what would replace it? A farrago of state laws, some even more lax than the ones we have today? Federal laws with even stricter gun regulations?

My own stand on guns is that they should be severely restricted along the lines that the UK has. No handguns, automatic or semi-automatic weapons, justifications and strict controls needed to own any firearm, and private ownership of such arms limited to shotguns and sporting rifles. (The UK of course has a much lower rate of gun violence than the U.S., but gun nuts make unconvincing arguments that regulation and deaths are unconnected.)

I don’t know how this will happen, but I dearly want it to happen, for too many lives have been taken away but morons who cling to their guns—or by innocents who accidentally discharge them. Statistics show that guns do not make people safer, for they wreak more carnage than they do in protecting homeowners.

When the shootings in Florida took place, I hesitantly suggested that perhaps this might mark a turning point in America’s attitude toward guns. And indeed, the demonstrations by young people, which greatly heartened me, made me think that maybe something will happen. But as the days pass, I fear the activism will wane, and we’ll be back to business as usual. In my own city, 499 people have been shot this year (91 killed), and someone is shot every four minutes. Can anyone stop the madness?