REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT

Intellectual Think Tank Analysts Advise Repealing the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment guarantees the right of an individual to own guns and for that reason it should be repealed, according to a legal affairs analyst who opposes gun ownership.

By de Andréa

"The Second Amendment is one of the clearest statements of citizen rights in the Constitution;" Benjamin Wittes, a guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution, acknowledged this in a recent liberal think tank discussion

"We've had decades of intellectual gymnastics to try to make those words not mean what they say."Wittes, who said he has "no particular enthusiasm for the idea of a gun culture," but rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether.

"Rather than debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, I think the appropriate debate is whether we want a Second Amendment at all," Wittes said. He conceded, however, that the political likelihood of getting the amendment repealed is "pretty limited.

"Wittes said the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms meant more when it was crafted more than 200 years ago than it does today. Modern society is "much more ambivalent than they [the founders] were about whether gun ownership really is fundamental to liberty," he said."One of the things that they [the Founders] believed was that the right of states to organize militias, and therefore individuals to be armed, was necessary to protect the liberty of those states against the federal government," Wittes said. "This is something we don't really believe as a society anymore.

"But challenging the Second Amendment on the basis that society's circumstances have changed since the drafting would similarly open up to question all other constitutional rights, according to Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett, who also participated in the discussion.

"The techniques that are used to show that the Second Amendment really doesn't have any contemporary relevance are available to anybody who wants to show that aspects of the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment also have no contemporary relevance," he said.

Citing the Fourth Amendment, which protects "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," Barnett argued, "Sure it was fine that persons should be secure in their papers and effects back in the old days when there wasn't a danger of terrorism and mass murder."But advocates of warrantless searches could make an "appeal to changing circumstances," on the basis that the Fourth Amendment is "archaic [and] we don't need it anymore."

THE BOTTOM LINE: What I find extremely interesting about this discussion is first; the acknowledgement of Wittes (an anti-gun advocate) that the Second Amendment actually says that individual citizens have the right to keep a bear arms. Next he admits to the ambivalence of the American public to understand that the Amendment was to protect the future security of liberty, which is usually caused by the lack of knowledge about a given subject. This ignorance propels the idea that we do not need that security anymore, as if our Government officials have outgrown the natural tendency to want absolute control, and therefore rendering physical power in the hands of the people no longer necessary.

Randy Barnett law professor of Georgetown University brings up a very valid point as to the relevance of all the Amendments should the Second be reversed. If we have actually outgrown the Second Amendment then one could call in to question the need for the documentation of any of our rights, or even the entire Constitution.

This of course is naive and absurd. Moreover it is the very point of Second Amendment. As I have so often said, if in fact the Second would be either totally ignored as is surreptitiously being done, or repealed, we would eventually lose all the rest of our inalienable rights protected by the Bill. The most fundamental truth that these Godless, self-appointed social elitists fail to recognize is that the Constitution only documents our rights, it doesn’t give them or take them away. Our rights as the Declaration documents; are inalienable, and thus given to us by our Creator. So even the repeal of our rights would be irrelevant, they would simply be undocumented rights. What Wittes also fails to recognize is that the reason we still have a free liberated Democratic Republic yet today, is because of the Second Amendment which has the potential to protect all the others.

de Andréa