Justice John Paul Stevens has bad timing.
With his most recent New York Times op-ed, the retired Supreme Court justice has upped the gun control ante at a moment when liberals are particularly unprepared. Stevens calls on the Left to take up repeal of the Second Amendment as the only effective and durable measure against gun violence, something that until recently only the most extreme would openly embrace.
The elderly jurist emerged from retirement to encourage the children marchers who descended on Washington last weekend to set their sights on something higher than prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles, age restrictions, or additional background checks. “The demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform,” Stevens writes. “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”
“It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States,” Stevens concludes. “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.”
Never mind that a student is at greater risk of being struck by lightning than by a school shooter. The Stevens argument has come down like a political thunderclap. It exposes as illegitimate all the eye-rolling liberal denials that they are not actually interested in confiscating guns.
“No,” an exasperated Washington Post editorial board wrote in 2016, “Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to ‘abolish’ the Second Amendment.” Rewriting the Constitution, Kris Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told the Atlantic just this month “is really not part of the discussion.” And now most recently organizers for the March for Our Lives have bent over backwards to appear moderate, insisting that “we support the Second Amendment.”
But anything short of repeal is in vain, according to Stevens’ argument. As Stevens explains, current precedent favors gunowners, making any attempts at moderate regulation ultimately meaningless.
Plenty will disagree with the legal arguments of Stevens. Indeed, that justice made a career of trying to rollback parts of the Constitution he finds objectionable. But no one can dismiss the pragmatic political argument he is making. The Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the right to bear arms belongs to individual citizens.
That op-ed forces an awkward decision on gun controllers. They can agree that their agenda is repeal of this right, or they could continue to claim they have no such aims.
Endangered Democrats will be forced to split with the justice if they want to keep their seats. Liberal incumbents in red states will repeat arguments about gradual and moderate gun regulation. They will say they don’t want to repeal the Second Amendment. But now, it will be harder to believe them.
