Right Wing Freaks Out as Former Supreme Court Justice Argues to Repeal the Second Amendment

When I signed in to Twitter this morning, it wasn’t long before I came across dozens of angry wingnuts ranting that “THE LIBS ARE COMING TO TAKE MAH GUNZ!!1 IT BEGINS!”

What are they losing their alleged minds over today, you ask? Well, it’s this op-ed in the New York Times by retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, arguing to repeal the Second Amendment.

The crux of his argument is that the NRA has insidiously distorted the intent of the Second Amendment with a decades-long propaganda campaign, and the best way to fight them is to use the Constitution itself to take away their main weapon, through a constitutional amendment.

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.”

I’m under no illusions that this will actually happen, of course, but a United States with sane gun laws not determined by far right propaganda organizations is a lovely dream, isn’t it?

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