should the second amendment be repealed essay

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Why It’s Time to Repeal the Second Amendment

By David S. Cohen

David S. Cohen

I teach the Constitution for a living. I revere the document when it is used to further social justice and make our country a more inclusive one. I admire the Founders for establishing a representative democracy that has survived for over two centuries.

But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong. This is one of those times. We need to say loud and clear: The Second Amendment must be repealed.

As much as we have a culture of reverence for the founding generation, it’s important to understand that they got it wrong — and got it wrong often. Unfortunately, in many instances, they enshrined those faults in the Constitution. For instance, most people don’t know it now, but under the original document , Mitt Romney would be serving as President Obama’s vice president right now because he was the runner-up in the last presidential election. That part of the Constitution was fixed by the Twelfth Amendment , which set up the system we currently have of the president and vice president running for office together.

Much more profoundly, the Framers and the Constitution were wildly wrong on race. They enshrined slavery into the Constitution in multiple ways , including taking the extreme step of prohibiting the Constitution from being amended to stop the slave trade in the country’s first 20 years. They also blatantly wrote racism into the Constitution by counting slaves as only 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation. It took a bloody civil war to fix these constitutional flaws (and then another 150 years, and counting, to try to fix the societal consequences of them).

There are others flaws that have been fixed (such as about voting and Presidential succession ), and still other flaws that have not yet been fixed (such as about equal rights for women and land-based representation in the Senate ), but the point is the same — there is absolutely nothing permanently sacrosanct about the Founders and the Constitution. They were deeply flawed people, it was and is a flawed document, and when we think about how to make our country a more perfect union , we must operate with those principles in mind.

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In the face of yet another mass shooting , now is the time to acknowledge a profound but obvious truth – the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned. We can do that through a Constitutional amendment. It’s been done before (when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed prohibition in the Eighteenth ), and it must be done now.

The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact. When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15  assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized.

Why It’s Time to Repeal the Second Amendment , Page 1 of 2

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Video: Ron's Office Hours

Repeal the second amendment that's not so simple. here's what it would take.

Credit: NPR

"The Second Amendment."

If you've lived in America, you've heard those words spoken with feeling.

The feeling may have been forceful, even vehement.

"Why? The Second Amendment, that's why."

What Would It Take To Repeal The 2nd Amendment?

The same words can be heard uttered in bitterness, as if in blame.

Or then again, with reverence, an invocation of the sacred — rather like "the Second Coming."

Talk of gun rights and gun control is back on full boil after 17 people were killed in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, so the conversation turns to the Second Amendment quickly and often.

We are talking, of course, about the Second Amendment to U.S. Constitution, in the Bill of Rights.

It reads in full:

"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."

Simple. And not simple. Assuming it means just what it says, just what does it actually say?

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Scholars have parsed the words, and courts and lawyers have argued over their meaning. Historians have debated what was meant by "well-regulated militia" back in 1789.

Some say the framers only meant to protect well-organized militias in the respective states, forerunners of today's National Guard. Others say the framers also intended to shield the guns of individuals, the weapons they would use if those militias were called upon to fight.

Heller brings some clarity

To some extent, the issue was clarified, if not settled, by the Heller decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008. The 5-4 decision held that the Second Amendment meant individuals had an inherent right to own guns for lawful purposes.

Heller applied that standard to overturn a ban on privately held handguns, enacted in the District of Columbia. But the same basic reasoning has also been used to defend the private ownership of AR-15-type rifles such as the one used in Parkland and other mass shootings in recent years.

Congress Stalled On Bills To Tighten Gun Background Check System

Congress tried to ban "assault-style" weapons in 1994 but put a 10-year sunset provision in the law. It survived court challenges at the time, but when the 10-year term had passed, the majority control of Congress had also passed — from the Democrats, who had enacted the ban, to the Republicans, who let it lapse.

Since then, all efforts to restrict the sale of such weapons have failed. Even relatively bipartisan attempts at strengthening other restrictions, such as the Manchin-Toomey background check expansion bill in 2013, have fallen short of the necessary supermajority needed for passage in the Senate.

It was not, as President Trump alleged Wednesday, because of a lack of "presidential backup." President Barack Obama supported the bill, as Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, pointed out to Trump. Republicans filibustered the bill, which got 54 votes.

In each case, defenders of gun rights have invoked the Second Amendment, the text that casts a long shadow across all discussions of guns in the U.S. At times, it seems to all but end such discussion.

Parkland changes calculus

But now, the tide is running the other way. The Parkland shootings have created a new moment and a new movement, led by teenagers who survived the tragedy and took their protests to social media and beyond.

Suddenly, even Trump is tossing out ideas about keeping students safe, arming teachers, restraining gun sales through background checks and higher age limits, and even banning accessories such as "bump stocks" that enable nonautomatic weapons to fire rapidly and repeatedly.

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And it's still unclear what Trump wants exactly. Republicans on Capitol Hill seem flummoxed by Trump's posture.

After Trump's made-for-cable bipartisan meeting at the White House with members of Congress, Texas Republican John Cornyn, a leader on gun issues in the Senate, seemed to scratch his head.

"I think everybody is trying to absorb what we just heard," Cornyn told reporters. "He's a unique president, and I think if he was focused on a specific piece of legislation rather than a grab bag of ideas, then I think he could have a lot of influence, but right now we don't have that."

He added that he didn't think simply because the president says he supports something that it would pass muster with Republicans. "I wouldn't confuse what he said with what can actually pass," Cornyn said. "I don't expect to see any great divergence in terms of people's views on the Second Amendment, for example."

Ah, and there are those two words again — Second Amendment.

If new restrictions are enacted — a prospect far from certain, as Cornyn rightly points out — they will surely be tested in the courts. There, it will be argued that they infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens to "keep and bear" firearms.

In other words, they will run afoul of, that's right, the Second Amendment.

Anticipating that, some gun control advocates — and at least one lifelong Republican — want to leap to the ultimate battlement and do it now. They want to repeal, or substantially alter, the formidable amendment itself.

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That would seem logical, at least to these advocates. If some 70 percent of Americans want more gun control and the Second Amendment stands in their way, why shouldn't they be able to do something about it?

Someday, it is conceivable, the people and politicians of the United States may be ready for that. But it will need to be a very different United States than we know today.

Why? Because amendments to the Constitution, once ratified, become fully part of the Constitution. Changing or removing them requires a two-stage process that has proved historically difficult.

The Founding Fathers were willing to be edited, it seems, but they did not want it to be easy. So they made the amending process a steep uphill climb, requiring a clear national consensus to succeed.

Why it takes consensus

A proposed amendment to the Constitution must first be passed by Congress with two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate.

The two chambers have not achieved such a margin for a newly written amendment to the Constitution in nearly half a century. The last such effort was the 26th Amendment (lowering the voting age nationwide from 21 to 18), and it cleared Capitol Hill in March 1971.

(There has been another amendment added since, in 1992, but it had been written and approved by Congress literally generations ago. More about that curious "zombie" amendment below.)

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Even after surviving both chambers of Congress in 1971, the 18-year-old vote amendment still had to survive the second stage of the process — the more difficult stage.

Just like all the other amendments before it, the new voting age had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. That is currently at least 38 states. Another way to look at it: If as few as 13 states refuse, the amendment stalls.

This arduous process has winnowed out all but a handful of the amendments proposed over the past 230 years. Every Congress produces scores of proposals, sometimes well over 100. The 101st Congress (1989 to 1991) produced 214.

Some deal with obscure concerns; many address facets of the electoral process — especially the Electoral College and the choosing of a president. Many are retreads from earlier sessions of Congress. The one thing most have in common is that they never even come to a vote.

Two that fell short

In 1995, a watershed year with big new GOP majorities in both chambers, two major constitutional amendments were brought to votes in the Capitol. One would have imposed term limits on members of Congress. It failed to get even close to two-thirds in the House, so the Senate did not bother.

The other proposed amendment would have required the federal government to balance its budget, not in theory down the road but in reality and in real time. It quickly got two-thirds in the House but failed to reach that threshold in the Senate by a single vote (one Republican in the chamber voted no).

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So even relatively popular ideas with a big head of steam can hit the wall of the amendment process. How much more challenging would it be to tackle individual gun ownership in a country where so many citizens own guns — and care passionately about their right to do so?

Overcoming the NRA and other elements of the gun lobby is only the beginning. The real obstacle would be tremendous support for guns in Southern, Western and rural Midwestern states, which would easily total up to more than enough states to block a gun control amendment.

There have been six amendments that got the needed margins in House and Senate but not the needed margin of support in the state legislatures. The most recent was the Equal Rights Amendment, a remarkably simple statement ("Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex" ) that cleared Congress with bipartisan support in 1972 and quickly won nods from most of the states.

But in the mid-1970s, a resistance campaign began and stymied the ERA in many of the remaining states. The resistance then managed to persuade several states to rescind their ratification votes. With momentum now reversed, the ERA died when its window for ratification closed.

Zombie amendments

Other amendments that met similar fates included one granting statehood to the District of Columbia. Like the ERA, the D.C. amendment had a time limit for ratification that expired. But other amendments sent out for ratification in the past did not have a limit, and so might still be ratified — at least theoretically.

The Zombie Amendments To The Constitution You've Probably Never Heard Of

The granddaddy of these "zombie" amendments was the very first among the Bill of Rights, which began with 12 items rather than 10. The proposed amendment sought to regulate the number of constituents to be represented by a member of the House, and its numbers were soon outdated. So it has never been ratified and presumably will not be.

The one other amendment originally proposed in 1789 but not ratified as part of the original 10 amendments sat around for generations. Then it caught the attention of state legislatures in the late 1980s, at a time of popular reaction against pay raises for Congress. This amendment stated that a member of Congress who voted for a pay raise could not receive that raise until after the next election for the House of Representatives.

That amendment was dusted off and recirculated, and it reached the ratification threshold in 1992, more than 200 years after it had first been proposed. It is now the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, and the last — at least so far.

A new Constitutional Convention?

If all this seems daunting, as it should, there is one alternative for changing the Constitution. That is the calling of a Constitutional Convention. This, too, is found in Article V of the Constitution and allows for a new convention to bypass Congress and address issues of amendment on its own.

To exist with this authority, the new convention would need to be called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures.

So if 34 states saw fit, they could convene their delegations and start writing amendments. Some believe such a convention would have the power to rewrite the entire 1787 Constitution, if it saw fit. Others say it would and should be limited to specific issues or targets, such as term limits or balancing the budget — or changing the campaign-finance system or restricting the individual rights of gun owners.

There have been calls for an "Article V convention" from prominent figures on the left as well as the right. But there are those on both sides of the partisan divide who regard the entire proposition as suspect, if not frightening.

One way or another, any changes made by such a powerful convention would need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states — just like amendments that might come from Congress.

And three-fourths would presumably be as high a hurdle for convention-spawned amendments as it has been for those from Congress — dating to the 1700s.

Correction March 1, 2018

In an earlier version of this story, the comma after "A well-regulated militia" was inadvertently omitted from the Second Amendment.

Also, an earlier photo caption misidentified ammunition magazines as clips.

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The Case for Repealing the Second Amendment? The Historical Barriers to Constitutional Change

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David T. Konig; The Case for Repealing the Second Amendment? The Historical Barriers to Constitutional Change. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2021; 51 (4): 595–607. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01629

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The controversy surrounding the Second Amendment—“the right of the people to keep and bear arms”—is, to a large extent, historical in nature, redolent of other matters in this country’s legal and constitutional past. But the historical analogies that might support the Amendment’s repeal do not permit easy conclusions. The issue demands that legal historians venture beyond familiar territory to confront unavoidable problems at the intersection of theory and practice and of constitutional law and popular constitutionalism. An interdisciplinary analysis of Lichtman’s Repeal the Second Amendment illuminates the political, legal, and constitutional dimensions—as well as the perils—of undertaking the arduous amending process permitted by Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-difficult-would-it-be-to-repeal-the-second-amendment

How difficult would it be to repeal the Second Amendment?

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for the repeal of the Second Amendment on Tuesday, wading into the charged political debate over gun control that was reignited by several mass shootings in recent months.

It’s a familiar appeal from the 97-year old jurist, who was named to the bench by President Gerald Ford in 1975 and retired in 2010. But Stevens renewed his plea in an op-ed in the New York Times, three days after activists staged massive gun control demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and in other cities around the country and world over the weekend. Stevens praised the protesters for demanding reforms to current gun laws, but said they should go further.

“The demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment,” Stevens wrote.

Repealing the amendment, Stevens said, would effectively overturn the controversial 2008 Supreme Court ruling D.C. v. Heller, which found that the Second Amendment protected “an individual right to possess a firearm” for the purpose of self-defense.

In his op-ed, Stevens, who dissented in the 5-4 decision, wrote that the ruling gave the National Rifle Association “a propaganda weapon of immense power.”

He added: “Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

So, what would the process of repealing the Second Amendment actually look like?

For starters, it would require the ratification of another amendment. This isn’t an easy step, but it’s been done before: After the U.S. prohibited alcohol sales in the 18th Amendment, the country later repealed the controversial amendment about a decade and a half later, with the 21st amendment.

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, seen departing the funeral of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, on Feb. 20, 2016. File photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

There are two pathways for proposing another amendment. In the first scenario, Congress proposes an amendment with a two-thirds majority vote in the House and Senate.

The other option is for two-thirds of state legislatures — that’s 34 states — to call a constitutional convention. In both scenarios, three-fourths of the states — 38 states — would have to give their stamp of approval to ratify the proposed amendment.

So far, however, none of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have come out of the constitutional convention process. And remember in its 223-year lifespan, the Constitution has been amended only 27 times. The last amendment, concerning U.S. legislators’ salaries, was ratified in 1992.

What’s next?

The social media reaction to Stevens’ suggestion was swift.

Some scholars noted that Stevens’ op-ed could be counterproductive to legislative efforts to regulate guns, which would have broader public support than repealing the Second Amendment. While only about a fifth of Americans support repealing the Second Amendment, according to a February Economist/YouGov poll, about 60 percent of those polled said they favored stricter gun laws.

“To frame it as we can only have gun regulations if we repeal the #2Amendment” is not only wrong as a matter of constitutional text & history but also sets the movement up for failure,” the legal expert Elizabeth Wydra tweeted.

Josh Chafetz, a professor at Cornell Law School, said that Democrats could focus their energy instead on winning back the White House and Senate. Then, they could “appoint judges who share Stevens’s views and who will therefore narrow and eventually overturn Heller,” Chafetz wrote in a tweet. .

In a statement Tuesday, NRA Executive Director Chris Cox called Stevens’ proposal a “radical idea.”

Stevens’ arguments is evidence that “the gun-control lobby is no longer distancing themselves from the radical idea of repealing the Second Amendment and banning all firearms,” Cox said.

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A Supreme Court justice’s solution to gun violence: Repeal Second Amendment

Four years ago, when — as now — the nation was reeling from the horror of a mass school shooting, a retired Supreme Court justice suggested a radical solution: getting rid of the Second Amendment.

John Paul Stevens issued the call after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. The attack prompted hundreds of thousands to demand action the next month to end gun violence at the March for Our Lives .

In a March 27, 2018, New York Times op-ed , Stevens praised the protesters and their call for stricter gun control laws. “But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform,” he wrote, about a year before his death at 99 . “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”

Stevens said the amendment was adopted out of concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the states. “Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century,” he wrote.

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He called repeal a “simple but dramatic action [that] would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform” and would make schoolchildren safer.

But Stevens didn’t acknowledge the herculean challenge that his proposal entailed, as there was (and remains) zero chance that gun control advocates would get anywhere close to the two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states needed for repeal.

Stevens’s proposal didn’t generate a lot of momentum, but it did get pushback from some fellow liberals.

“I admire Justice Stevens but his supposedly ‘simple but dramatic’ step of repealing the 2d Am is AWFUL advice,” tweeted Laurence Tribe , a Harvard law professor. “The obstacle to strong gun laws is political, not legal. Urging a politically impossible effort just strengthens opponents of achievable reform.”

Tribe expanded on his argument in a Washington Post op-ed, headlined “ The Second Amendment isn’t the problem .” “The NRA’s strongest rallying cry has been: ‘They’re coming for our beloved Second Amendment,’” he wrote. “Enter Stevens, stage left, boldly calling for the amendment’s demise, thereby giving aid and comfort to the gun lobby’s favorite argument.”

In his op-ed, Stevens wrote that repeal was necessary to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling that Americans had an individual right to bear arms. He was one of four dissenters in that case.

They were killers with powerful guns. The president went after their weapons.

“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,” Stevens wrote in the op-ed.

Republican President Gerald Ford nominated Stevens to the court in 1975, at a time when Supreme Court nominations were not as politicized as they are today. Stevens eventually became one of its most liberal members. Although his 2018 proposal didn’t go anywhere, calls for repeal continue today.

“Who will say on this network or any other network in the next few days, ‘It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment?’” liberal filmmaker Michael Moore challenged during a feisty appearance on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” this week.

“Look, I support all gun control legislation,” Moore said. “Not sensible gun control. We don’t need the sensible stuff. We need the hardcore stuff that’s going to protect ourselves and our children.”

Writing in the New Republic on Thursday, Walter Shapiro, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and a lecturer in political science at Yale University, said that “the hard truth is that the core problem is the Second Amendment itself. And America is going to reel from one mass murder to another unless the Second Amendment is repealed or the Supreme Court drastically reduces its scope.”

“As a starting point,” he added, “Democrats should drop the mealy-mouthed formulation, ‘Nobody supports the Second Amendment more than I do, but still. … ’ Claiming fidelity to the Second Amendment has never convinced a single NRA supporter of a candidate’s sincerity, but it has stopped bold thinking about lasting solutions to America’s gun crisis.”

The first U.S. school shooting was in 1853. Its victim was a teacher.

But repeal hasn’t been a mainstream cause. Just last month, President Biden declared , “I support the Second Amendment,” although he said that didn’t mean people could get any gun they wanted. In the wake of this week’s Texas elementary school massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers , the president said the Second Amendment is not absolute, and that common-sense gun control would not “negatively affect” it.

Stevens’s op-ed came just a few years after he issued a proposal to amend the Second Amendment, in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” which was excerpted in a 2014 Washington Post opinion piece . Stevens suggested adding five words (in italics below) to the amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

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The first amendment, interpretation & debate, the second amendment, matters of debate, common interpretation, the reasonable right to bear arms, not a second class right: the second amendment today.

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University Professor at George Mason University University Antonin Scalia School of Law

by Adam Winkler

Professor of Law at University of California Los Angeles Law School

Modern debates about the Second Amendment have focused on whether it protects a private right of individuals to keep and bear arms, or a right that can be exercised only through militia organizations like the National Guard. This question, however, was not even raised until long after the Bill of Rights was adopted.

Many in the Founding generation believed that governments are prone to use soldiers to oppress the people. English history suggested that this risk could be controlled by permitting the government to raise armies (consisting of full-time paid troops) only when needed to fight foreign adversaries. For other purposes, such as responding to sudden invasions or other emergencies, the government could rely on a militia that consisted of ordinary civilians who supplied their own weapons and received some part-time, unpaid military training.

The onset of war does not always allow time to raise and train an army, and the Revolutionary War showed that militia forces could not be relied on for national defense. The Constitutional Convention therefore decided that the federal government should have almost unfettered authority to establish peacetime standing armies and to regulate the militia.

This massive shift of power from the states to the federal government generated one of the chief objections to the proposed Constitution. Anti-Federalists argued that the proposed Constitution would take from the states their principal means of defense against federal usurpation. The Federalists responded that fears of federal oppression were overblown, in part because the American people were armed and would be almost impossible to subdue through military force.

Implicit in the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists were two shared assumptions. First, that the proposed new Constitution gave the federal government almost total legal authority over the army and militia. Second, that the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry. They disagreed only about whether an armed populace could adequately deter federal oppression.

The Second Amendment conceded nothing to the Anti-Federalists’ desire to sharply curtail the military power of the federal government, which would have required substantial changes in the original Constitution. Yet the Amendment was easily accepted because of widespread agreement that the federal government should not have the power to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms, any more than it should have the power to abridge the freedom of speech or prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Much has changed since 1791. The traditional militia fell into desuetude, and state-based militia organizations were eventually incorporated into the federal military structure. The nation’s military establishment has become enormously more powerful than eighteenth century armies. We still hear political rhetoric about federal tyranny, but most Americans do not fear the nation’s armed forces and virtually no one thinks that an armed populace could defeat those forces in battle. Furthermore, eighteenth century civilians routinely kept at home the very same weapons they would need if called to serve in the militia, while modern soldiers are equipped with weapons that differ significantly from those generally thought appropriate for civilian uses. Civilians no longer expect to use their household weapons for militia duty, although they still keep and bear arms to defend against common criminals (as well as for hunting and other forms of recreation).

The law has also changed. While states in the Founding era regulated guns—blacks were often prohibited from possessing firearms and militia weapons were frequently registered on government rolls—gun laws today are more extensive and controversial. Another important legal development was the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Second Amendment originally applied only to the federal government, leaving the states to regulate weapons as they saw fit. Although there is substantial evidence that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect the right of individuals to keep and bear arms from infringement by the states, the Supreme Court rejected this interpretation in United States v. Cruikshank (1876).

Until recently, the judiciary treated the Second Amendment almost as a dead letter. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), however, the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law that forbade nearly all civilians from possessing handguns in the nation’s capital. A 5–4 majority ruled that the language and history of the Second Amendment showed that it protects a private right of individuals to have arms for their own defense, not a right of the states to maintain a militia.

The dissenters disagreed. They concluded that the Second Amendment protects a nominally individual right, though one that protects only “the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia.” They also argued that even if the Second Amendment did protect an individual right to have arms for self-defense, it should be interpreted to allow the government to ban handguns in high-crime urban areas.

Two years later, in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Court struck down a similar handgun ban at the state level, again by a 5–4 vote. Four Justices relied on judicial precedents under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Justice Thomas rejected those precedents in favor of reliance on the Privileges or Immunities Clause, but all five members of the majority concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment protects against state infringement of the same individual right that is protected from federal infringement by the Second Amendment.

Notwithstanding the lengthy opinions in Heller and McDonald , they technically ruled only that government may not ban the possession of handguns by civilians in their homes. Heller tentatively suggested a list of “presumptively lawful” regulations, including bans on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, bans on carrying firearms in “sensitive places” such as schools and government buildings, laws restricting the commercial sale of arms, bans on the concealed carry of firearms, and bans on weapons “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Many issues remain open, and the lower courts have disagreed with one another about some of them, including important questions involving restrictions on carrying weapons in public.

Gun control is as much a part of the Second Amendment as the right to keep and bear arms. The text of the amendment, which refers to a “well regulated Militia,” suggests as much. As the Supreme Court correctly noted in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the militia of the founding era was the body of ordinary citizens capable of taking up arms to defend the nation. While the Founders sought to protect the citizenry from being disarmed entirely, they did not wish to prevent government from adopting reasonable regulations of guns and gun owners.

Although Americans today often think that gun control is a modern invention, the Founding era had laws regulating the armed citizenry. There were laws designed to ensure an effective militia, such as laws requiring armed citizens to appear at mandatory musters where their guns would be inspected. Governments also compiled registries of civilian-owned guns appropriate for militia service, sometimes conducting door-to-door surveys. The Founders had broad bans on gun possession by people deemed untrustworthy, including slaves and loyalists. The Founders even had laws requiring people to have guns appropriate for militia service.

The wide range of Founding-era laws suggests that the Founders understood gun rights quite differently from many people today. The right to keep and bear arms was not a libertarian license for anyone to have any kind of ordinary firearm, anywhere they wanted. Nor did the Second Amendment protect a right to revolt against a tyrannical government. The Second Amendment was about ensuring public safety, and nothing in its language was thought to prevent what would be seen today as quite burdensome forms of regulation.   

The Founding-era laws indicate why the First Amendment is not a good analogy to the Second. While there have always been laws restricting perjury and fraud by the spoken word, such speech was not thought to be part of the freedom of speech. The Second Amendment, by contrast, unambiguously recognizes that the armed citizenry must be regulated—and regulated “well.” This language most closely aligns with the Fourth Amendment, which protects a right to privacy but also recognizes the authority of the government to conduct reasonable searches and seizures. 

The principle that reasonable regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment has been affirmed throughout American history. Ever since the first cases challenging gun controls for violating the Second Amendment or similar provisions in state constitutions, courts have repeatedly held that “reasonable” gun laws—those that don’t completely deny access to guns by law-abiding people—are constitutionally permissible. For 150 years, this was the settled law of the land—until Heller .

Heller , however, rejected the principle of reasonableness only in name, not in practice. The decision insisted that many types of gun control laws are presumptively lawful, including bans on possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, bans on concealed carry, bans on dangerous and unusual weapons, restrictions on guns in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, and commercial sale restrictions. Nearly all gun control laws today fit within these exceptions. Importantly, these exceptions for modern-day gun laws unheard of in the Founding era also show that lawmakers are not limited to the types of gun control in place at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification.

In the years since Heller , the federal courts have upheld the overwhelming majority of gun control laws challenged under the Second Amendment. Bans on assault weapons have been consistently upheld, as have restrictions on gun magazines that hold more than a minimum number of rounds of ammunition. Bans on guns in national parks, post offices, bars, and college campuses also survived. These decisions make clear that lawmakers have wide leeway to restrict guns to promote public safety so long as the basic right of law-abiding people to have a gun for self-defense is preserved.

Perhaps the biggest open question after Heller is whether the Second Amendment protects a right to carry guns in public. While every state allows public carry, some states restrict that right to people who can show a special reason to have a gun on the street. To the extent these laws give local law enforcement unfettered discretion over who can carry, they are problematic. At the same time, however, many constitutional rights are far more limited in public than in the home. Parades can be required to have a permit, the police have broader powers to search pedestrians and motorists than private homes, and sexual intimacy in public places can be completely prohibited. 

The Supreme Court may yet decide that more stringent limits on gun control are required under the Second Amendment. Such a decision, however, would be contrary to the text, history, and tradition of the right to keep and bear arms.

The right to keep and bear arms is a lot like the right to freedom of speech. In each case, the Constitution expressly protects a liberty that needs to be insulated from the ordinary political process. Neither right, however, is absolute. The First Amendment, for example, has never protected perjury, fraud, or countless other crimes that are committed through the use of speech. Similarly, no reasonable person could believe that violent criminals should have unrestricted access to guns, or that any individual should possess a nuclear weapon.

Inevitably, courts must draw lines, allowing government to carry out its duty to preserve an orderly society, without unduly infringing the legitimate interests of individuals in expressing their thoughts and protecting themselves from criminal violence. This is not a precise science or one that will ever be free from controversy.

One judicial approach, however, should be unequivocally rejected. During the nineteenth century, courts routinely refused to invalidate restrictions on free speech that struck the judges as reasonable. This meant that speech got virtually no judicial protection. Government suppression of speech can usually be thought to serve some reasonable purpose, such as reducing social discord or promoting healthy morals. Similarly, most gun control laws can be viewed as efforts to save lives and prevent crime, which are perfectly reasonable goals. If that’s enough to justify infringements on individual liberty, neither constitutional guarantee means much of anything.

During the twentieth century, the Supreme Court finally started taking the First Amendment seriously. Today, individual freedom is generally protected unless the government can make a strong case that it has a real need to suppress speech or expressive conduct, and that its regulations are tailored to that need. The legal doctrines have become quite complex, and there is room for disagreement about many of the Court’s specific decisions. Taken as a whole, however, this body of case law shows what the Court can do when it appreciates the value of an individual right enshrined in the Constitution.

The Second Amendment also raises issues about which reasonable people can disagree. But if the Supreme Court takes this provision of the Constitution as seriously as it now takes the First Amendment, which it should do, there will be some easy issues as well.

•           District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) is one example. The “right of the people” protected by the Second Amendment is an individual right, just like the “right[s] of the people” protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. The Constitution does not say that the Second Amendment protects a right of the states or a right of the militia, and nobody offered such an interpretation during the Founding era. Abundant historical evidence indicates that the Second Amendment was meant to leave citizens with the ability to defend themselves against unlawful violence. Such threats might come from usurpers of governmental power, but they might also come from criminals whom the government is unwilling or unable to control.

•           McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) was also an easy case under the Court’s precedents. Most other provisions of the Bill of Rights had already been applied to the states because they are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” The right to keep and bear arms clearly meets this test.

•           The text of the Constitution expressly guarantees the right to bear arms, not just the right to keep them. The courts should invalidate regulations that prevent law-abiding citizens from carrying weapons in public, where the vast majority of violent crimes occur. First Amendment rights are not confined to the home, and neither are those protected by the Second Amendment.

•           Nor should the government be allowed to create burdensome bureaucratic obstacles designed to frustrate the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The courts are vigilant in preventing government from evading the First Amendment through regulations that indirectly abridge free speech rights by making them difficult to exercise. Courts should exercise the same vigilance in protecting Second Amendment rights.

•           Some other regulations that may appear innocuous should be struck down because they are little more than political stunts. Popular bans on so-called “assault rifles,” for example, define this class of guns in terms of cosmetic features, leaving functionally identical semi-automatic rifles to circulate freely. This is unconstitutional for the same reason that it would violate the First Amendment to ban words that have a French etymology, or to require that French fries be called “freedom fries.”

In most American states, including many with large urban population centers, responsible adults have easy access to ordinary firearms, and they are permitted to carry them in public. Experience has shown that these policies do not lead to increased levels of violence. Criminals pay no more attention to gun control regulations than they do to laws against murder, rape, and robbery. Armed citizens, however, prevent countless crimes and have saved many lives. What’s more, the most vulnerable people—including women, the elderly, and those who live in high crime neighborhoods—are among the greatest beneficiaries of the Second Amendment. If the courts require the remaining jurisdictions to stop infringing on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, their citizens will be more free and probably safer as well.

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Why a repeal of the 2nd Amendment would not be enough to stop gun violence

Since America called for a repeal of the Second Amendment in 2013, accidental and intentional deaths from guns in the United States have increased from 80 to 100 per day . The only significant change in federal law since 2013 is the bump stock ban regulation promulgated by the administration of President Trump.

The regulation went into effect in March 2019, but it is under a legal challenge as an overreach of executive power. Many states have passed effective gun control laws, and states with the highest death rates from guns are those with the most lenient laws.

Unlike other nations that prohibit or narrowly restrict ownership of high-body-count weaponry and ammunition, the United States is hindered in establishing effective gun control by federal and state constitutional roadblocks. Understanding these roadblocks is essential to devising a route around them.

The Second Amendment states: “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.” In 2008, a one-justice majority of the Supreme Court ( District of Columbia v. Heller ), which included Chief Justice Roberts, determined that the phrase “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” is “prefatory” language that does not restrict gun rights to members of government-sponsored militias.

In 2010, the high court ( McDonald v. Chicago ) held that the Second Amendment restricts both federal and state regulation of gun ownership and usage. The Heller decision acknowledged that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” but the question remains, “ [u]nder what framework should Second Amendment challenges be evaluated? ”

Unlike other nations that prohibit or narrowly restrict ownership of high-body-count weaponry and ammunition, the United States is hindered in establishing effective gun control by federal and state constitutional roadblocks.

Legal scholars are concerned that the five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court will liberally construe the Second Amendment to thwart legislative and regulatory efforts to prevent gun-related deaths. Nevertheless, as of this writing, there is no congressional proposal to repeal the Second Amendment, and the Hawaiian state legislature is alone in urging Congress to consider its repeal. But even the highly improbable repeal of the Second Amendment is not enough to guarantee laws designed to restrict gun deaths. Congress and/or state legislatures would need to pass those laws.

The balance of powers created by the U.S. Constitution gives supremacy to federal action undertaken in accordance with specifically enumerated powers and “ all laws which shall be necessary and proper ” to those powers but reserves all other authority to the states and the people . Federal laws must have the “requisite nexus” to their constitutional underpinnings or the courts will not enforce them.

Current federal gun laws are based on either Congress’s power to tax or its power to regulate interstate commerce. The National Firearms Act, which regulates gun sales through taxation, was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937, but it has recently come under attack by those who argue that changes in the law have severed its required nexus to the collection of revenue. In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear one such challenge, but other cases may arise in the future.

In 1995 ( United States v. Lopez ), the Supreme Court struck down the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, which was enacted pursuant to the commerce clause, ruling that the law’s prohibition of gun possession in a school zone had no relationship to economic activity. Since that ruling, Congress has rewritten the law to prohibit only gun possession that “ affects ” or has a “ concrete tie ” to interstate commerce. The courts have interpreted those phrases broadly to cover any activity with economic impact.

Nevertheless, several states, such as Arizona and Kansas , have tried to limit the impact of commerce clause gun laws by passing Second Amendment Protection Acts that purportedly make federal laws inapplicable to guns manufactured and sold solely within these states. These efforts have not been upheld by the courts , but a future pro-states’ rights Supreme Court might determine the Constitution requires recognition of these state laws over Congress’s broad use of its commerce clause powers.

Currently, all but six state constitutions include some gun rights provision and one of those six, Iowa , is in the process of adding a constitutional amendment to protect the right to bear arms. The authority of the states to enact gun laws is written into the 10th Amendment . This general police power is shared with local (county, city and town) governments by virtue of the authority granted to them by their state constitutions. Currently, all but six state constitutions include some gun rights provision and one of those six, Iowa , is in the process of adding a constitutional amendment to protect the right to bear arms. These provisions limit the ability of state legislatures and local authorities to enact gun controls and could provide a basis for judges to block enforcement of existing federal restrictions.

In sum, there are two judicial threats to effective gun control—an expansion of Second Amendment rights and a retraction of federal legislative powers . A simple repeal of the Second Amendment cures the first problem but not the second because the Supreme Court would still be free to reinterpret Congress’s taxation and commerce clause powers so as to strike down federal gun laws.

The clearest avenue toward sound legal protection for gun regulation is a new constitutional provision that specifically authorizes federal gun laws, but the best wording for such an authorization is not as clear. The late Justice John Paul Stevens’s 2014 proposal to add five words—“when serving in the Militia”—to the Second Amendment is not sufficient. His proposal cures the gun control problems created by the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald decisions but does not guarantee supremacy of federal law over state constitutional gun rights.

Filmmaker and social activist Michael Moore has suggested a rewriting that recognizes limited gun rights and the right to be free from gun violence, but his wording is unnecessarily cumbersome: “A well regulated State National Guard, being helpful to the safety and security of a State in times of need, along with the strictly regulated right of the people to keep and bear a limited number of non-automatic Arms for sport and hunting, with respect to the primary right of all people to be free from gun violence, this shall not be infringed.”

A more workable revision was suggested in 2013 by Zachary Elkins, director of the Comparative Constitutions Project. In an opinion piece titled “ Rewrite the Second Amendment ,” Mr. Elkins suggested a restatement indicating that the Constitution guarantees the “right to bear arms, subject to reasonable regulations protecting public safety.” This rewriting, according to Mr. Elkins, articulates “a basic consensus that would let both sides claim victory. The alternative is more violent rhetoric—and more deadly violence.”

Laws alone do not stop violence, but voters and lawmakers must make common-sense legislative and constitutional changes that will save lives . As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas Paine , the author of “ Common Sense ,” “Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword.”

Ellen K. Boegel is America ’s contributing editor for legal affairs.

Repeal the 2nd amendment and there would be a lot more dead people in the world. Now that is an opinion but based on other countries that got rid of guns. The most recent one is Venezuela.

In recent years guns ownership in the US has been growing quickly as homicides by guns have been going down. http://bit.ly/2PfzSnV

Most gun homicide deaths take place in poor areas. I believe the rate is 75% take place in 5% of the country.

An aside: Thomas Paine was a gifted writer. But Paine helped instigate the French Revolution with his writings and we know how well that turned out. At Paine's funeral in New York, 6 people attended.

Also Michael Moore with his buddies http://bit.ly/2Z91puB That the author mentions Moore is interesting.

References to Michael Moore and Thomas Paine were not written as endorsements. I did intend, however, to endorse Thomas Jefferson's appeal to reason over violence.

If there were ever a survey asking gun owners why they buy guns, I’d wager the majority of them would say that it basically is for protection...including protection from tyranny

What the Jesuits and their liberal authors don’t realize is the Montagnards always turn on the Girondists,

The counter-revolutionaries seeking to impose an irregular election have plenty of fire power.

The dead of the Civil War may argue with you on the militia clause, which was used to pursue Slave Power tyranny.

Amazing, the Civil War was due to the 2nd amendment.

It was the tool that let it happen. Without state militias, it would not have occurred. It was a necessary condition for both the bloodiest war in American history and the ability to maintain slavery at all. A disarmed South could not have help people in bondage.

That last sentence is a complete departure from reality. The civil war was only about slavery after the Union had committed war crimes and atrocities against American citizens that make the NAZI'S look like the Pennsylvania Dutch, and needed an excuse for what they did!

Firearms have always been easily accessible and available for purchase. They were listed for sale in the Sears Catalogs of many decades ago. They were available for sale in pawn shops with absolutely no background check required. So to suggest the availability of firearms as the root of the problem is a disingenuous argument. Enforcement, or the lack thereof, is a much larger problem. Laws were already in place to prevent the murders of the 26 churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas but were not acted upon. I note that current laws in NYC for illegal possession of a firearm are rather severe; they are also enforced. The murder rate has thus dropped drastically. Laws in Baltimore, MD, while enforced by the police, are not upheld by prosecutors and judges. The murder rate is thus one of the highest in the country. One law requires a sentencing guideline for use of a firearm in the commission of a felony- but this is only used when a plea deal is not reached. A wily attorney will offer to either tie the system up for his client or reach a deal negating the guideline and this with the actual return of diminished public safety, and the law then becomes a terrible joke. The first and obvious step is to become informed as to the realities of the implementation of local firearm laws then lobby to demand their usage. Stop coddling or otherwise defending those who use violence, and this includes actions by ALL individuals across the political spectrum. Not to insult the author(s) but to even consider the repeal of the 2nd amendment only exists as a salve applied, by those who are very lazy and simplistic, to a festering wound. The problem at the core of the issue is neatly summed up in this CNS quotation: "Robert George, director of the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, tweeted along similar lines:

'People have lots of motives for killing other people — greed, envy, ideology, hatred, racism, nihilism, and on and on. Sometimes people kill others simply because they are in the way. Only one thing can overcome all motives to kill: the conviction that every human life is sacred'" In summation, perhaps we would better spend our times attempting to bring this Truth to the world and enforcing current law as I do not believe we can legislate ourselves out of this problem. Laws without the required enforecement are meaningless endeavors.

The Civil War essentially ended the right of State Militias to take up arms against the federal government. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment constitutionaluzed it. Militia is now only authorized to repel invasion or insurrection.

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Of course, this does not apply if the insurrection wins.

Good article, and a helpful addition to this important national conversation. As a military veteran, I'm struck by how dysfunctional the civilian gun reality is, compared with the military approach to guns - an approach rooted in three pillars: training, safety, and accountability. Since more Americans have been killed by gun violence since 1968 than in all of America's wars combined, it is clear that we can do a better job. The author is not suggesting that any single solution will make all gun violence disappear, but this country sharply reduced deaths from vehicle accidents through a series of regulatory change (e.g. seat-belt use), technology requirements (airbags) and cultural change (e.g. driving drunk is bad). A similar series of changes will need to be created on this issue. One of the easiest changes to make is to ensure that all gun purchasers undergo a criminal background check. Clear evidence exists that these work to reduce deaths, which shouldn't surprise anyone since determining if the guy using the internet to buy a 9mm was recently arrested for domestic battery and false imprisonment would, after all, be a good thing (that exact thing happened in our town recently - he used the gun to kill his wife and then himself while the kids were nearby).

Also: while poll specifics fluctuate slightly, they routinely demonstrate that the majority of Americans - in the range of 80% - 95% - support criminal background checks for all gun purchases. This includes a majority of Republican voters and a majority of gun owners.

Thank you for your insightful comments. I agree that our country needs the three-pronged approach you suggest to reduce gun deaths.

no!-- I would not stop gun violence. but--- it would be a worthy acknowledge that the USA understands that violence is just a ''default.'' it would be a beginning. '''whiners'' would no longer able to use the second amendment as an '''excuse.''' amazingly and sadly, suicides are the root of the majority of death by guns. (and no one seems to care.)

just to correct, if interested: 'it' instead of 'I'......acknowledgement not acknowledge .... (be) able...'root cause' not just 'root'(sorry)

You can edit your comments. An "edit" button should be available to you under your comment.

Thank you for showing your cards. This will come in handy for opposing your plans.

Gun ownership is emblematic of of psychological impairment. If you need a gun, you are clearly very insecure. The language of the 2nd amendment clearly refers to an earlier time when militias were responsible for law and order, a time that has long passed. As a Christian nation we have lost sight of the 6th commandment, as well as Jesus" command to forgive and turn the other cheek. If you are insecure enough to need a gun, you are mentally ill and should not have one!

Obviously, the great barrier to restricting gun ownership is the weight of money in our political system. Gun violence is as costly as it is profitable. In many respects the the fruits, the profits, are limited to a few, and as is the burden, excepting for the anxiety, fear and general disruption of peace. Perhaps, the greatest short term defense against the maze of hurdles and traps is taxation - but no small tax. Any tax would need to be so pernicious that that the ownership of assault weapons would become prohibitive. Of course, those who profit from gun manufacturing and all the ancillary industry that is part of the gun culture, which is immense, will scream bloody murder, but, we can not be terrorized as a society by a proliferating gun culture and the purchase of politicians that enable it. This really goes to the role money plays in politics and whether there is a right to profit. The issue is much larger than merely guns, it goes to the very nature of society and its purpose. Sort of a Natural Rights question, unfortunately, this may be a bit too broad for the shortsightedness of a profit based society. But, these questions, like so many in our political culture, are subject to the marketing strategies of the moment, and have very little to do with reason or discourse or the acknowledgment of the existence of a culture intent on the obliteration of reason as a human trait. Welcome to the reality of the human condition addicted to the allusion of a profit-centered existence which isn't mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore, should be subject to state regulations - of course, this brings us back to money in politics, perhaps we should think of the problem as the tyranny of money in politics. Short term, the answer is to overthrow the profit class through the ballot box - which we seem to be witnessing.

Taxation of manufacturers and sellers and strict licensing and training requirements for gun owners are two common sense solutions.

Jake, you note, "Any tax would need to be so pernicious that that the ownership of assault weapons would become prohibitive."

Would a second tax, so pernicious that money in politics would become prohibitive, perhaps have merit?

The gun control argument always fails to make an important distinction - and that distinction is between evil and the instrumentalities of evil. In the absence of an available firearm, is it so hard to imagine the El Paso shooter still making his trip and planting a bomb or setting fire to the store and perhaps impeding the exits. Could not the Dayton shooter have crashed his car into the bar and set off an explosive, perhaps killing more than he actually did. There was a "mass" stabbing the other day, are we to start regulating knives? And an earlier commenter maintained there would have been no Civil War without firearms. Really, there were no battles or wars before the invention of gunpowder? The ancient Greeks and Romans would beg to differ. Place the focus where it belongs, on the perpetrator of these evil acts. Removing all guns, even if it were even remotely possible, only forces the evil-doer to be more creative.

There are fewer creative evildoers than evildoers. No fix has to be 100% effective to be warranted. Citizens do not need semi-automatic weapons that rapidly fire high velocity projectiles. We do not need to be awash in these weapons.

Stanley, with respect, the argument that there are fewer "creative" evildoers is pretty weak, not to mention likely not even true. There are somewhere between 250 and 300 million firearms in the US. How do you propose getting them? Lastly, as a matter of accuracy, a semi-automatic firearm fires one projectile with one trigger pull.

The Aussies took their advanced weaponry away from their private citizens and there's no evidence the previous death toll was maintained with bombs and automobiles as substitutes. There are not 250M high powered semi-automatic rifles in the US. Perhaps single digit millions. I am aware that it is one trigger pull per firing. But the lethality and woundings by the Dayton shooter in a matter of 32 seconds speaks for itself.

When I said 250-300 million firearms, I was referring to all types, including handguns. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates between 5 and 10 million AR-15s in the US, as you thought. The number is imprecise because the government doesn't keep track of firearms by type. You may only care about the AR-15, but the author of the article and many others at America wish to work around the 2nd Amendment for all firearms. Re Australia, their crime rate was declining before the ban and continued after the ban. An island country with a homogeneous population that is a small fraction of the US is a poor comparison. Lastly, don't forget the US did ban "assault rifles" in the 90s - not much effect observed on crime rates, which had and still are in decline.

I was merely clarifying. My concern is mainly AR-15 type weapons which are instrumental in the terroristic mass shootings which are becoming more common and egregious. I consider the status of other small arms to be a separate issue.

It is obvious Ellen has done more extensive research than many that oppose the Second Amendment Rights of American Citizens, she deserves credit for that. I do take exception with her making up her own facts to back up her opinions. Example - America called for the elimination of the Second Amendment , No , not America, a few people in America. I wonder how she imagines that First Amendment Rights would be defended without a Second Amendment ? How would she react to proposals to do away away with the First Amendment ? She is abusing and misusing her First Amendment Right to free speech by using it in an effort to deny our Second Amendment Rights. It should clear and understood that the founders did not intend that the Bill of Rights be turned against each other. That is wrong. It would be equally wrong to advocate the right of free speech, religion, or right to assembly be denied through the exercising of Second Amendment Rights. Understand ? The First Amendment is often abused and misused. The same is true for the second Amendment. To paraphrase a previous comment - Nobody needs free speech ! Is it not true that free speech can do great harm to many people ? Should we deny , diminish, or eliminate First Amendment Rights of everyone because a few abuse them ? We have a Bill of Rights, not a Bill of Needs. The right of a person to defend themselves is God given. The framers of the Constitution listed it in the Bill of Rights to prevent infringement by the government. Do you think God intended we should be defenseless against evil ? Do we not have enough sense and understanding to realize that firearms are inanimate objects, tools that have no soul or will ? Untouched they can lay for a century. They have no power to do anything A human is required for a firearm to do anything. How a firearm is utilized is totally dependent on the intent of the human being holding it In the hands of an evil person it can be used to do evil. In the hands of a good person, it can protect you from evil. Should be easy to understand If we are concerned with the evil some men do, does it not make sense to give our attention to the man and not the tool he uses ? Should we outlaw all religion because we are offended that there are a few false religions ?

There is this amnesia or ignorance in this Nation that thinks Constitutional rights are Government given? No, they are inalienable which means bestowed by a Creator, not a Government. It is,all a contract which means we the People get all these freedoms and Government answers to us, not vice versa.

It's not amnesia or ignorance;it's a rejection of a religio/nationalist narrative; a dogma. Our rights are, for political purposes, what just enough people in positions of power say they are. Though an individual may hold a right to be inalienable, until just enough people in positions of power say it is, one can be arrested by the powers that be for exercising this inalienable right. A right may be inalienable in ones hearts only. So for example, there was a time when many people thought they had a God given right to be engaged in gay relationsi but it was not until there were "just enough people in positions of power"; state judges then SC and then the populace coming along, can it now be said that its an" inalienable right" to live a gay life style.There was a time one could be imprisoned for having gay sex. The same for other freedoms once prohibited by law on the grounds they were not constitutionally protected inalienable rights. The Constitution can be interpreted to mean whatever we want it to mean. Our inalienable rights are only "recognized'when just enough people in positions of power have declared them so. Recognition is hindsight.In our hearts one can believe that our rights are God given[ for a person of faith, for an atheist they conform with human needs and wants]but in the world; of governments, of laws, of powers to punish,these rights are political rights arrived at though political frameworks.The second amendment is inalienable only because it's a religious dogma [part of our narrative of freedom;like the freedom to be without health insurance; every man/woman is an island].For a country that professes to be by and for the people, with a Constitution that girds this contract,we are quite paranoid about our government,[ our military too?] which we claim is part of us!

Everyone dances around the real issue of gun violence, it's not the Second Amendment or legal gun ownership of all types of firearms, it's innerciry violence via criminal and drug activity which accounts for about 80% of all non suicide gun deaths. Where is the outcry or debate about that? Or is pointing a figure at that demigraphic taboo, but NRA members are okay to denounce? Why is that? Is it that they're a certain makeup that is fair game for any and all bigotry and prejudice? That's my guess. So gun laws don't work, repealing the 2nd Amendment will start a violent revolt, and non suicide gun deaths will be undetered.

Ellen, thank you for a rational, non-inflammatory discussion on the 2nd amendment. I believe it will be the hot button issue in 2020. That a number of senators have threatened to packet he court if they do not get a ruling on a New York case raises "disgusting to a new level. Your arguments are reasonable. BUT there is no solution to the problem. We are fortunate to have this amendment. Self-defense is instinctual and basic. I do not accept the government decidi g for me the weapon I wish to use. I am72. I have owned at least one pistol for 50 years. I have brandished it twice, never discharged it but de-fused two possibly violent situations just by presenting it. The argument for the presence of guns may be circular. The more gu s, the more violence (maybe), but again, we do have the 2nd amendment. If you don't believe in guns you have several choices. First, try to change or eliminate the amendment. You will be unsuccessful. Life is tough. At least you had a constitutional process unlike many countries.. 2nd, move. Many countries allow no guns at all. If the lack of guns makes you more comfortable, philosophically or physically...bye bye. The third choice is to live with it. Cars and heart attacks kill more people than guns. I live in Suffolk County, NY. I have some police friends and respect them but as the saying goes, "when seconds count the police will be there in minutes." Lastly, who defines "reasonable"? A libertarian (I am) will define "reasonable"much differently than will Clinton. How do we add to the 2nd a definition of "reasonable" with which most of us agree? I do not believe that is possible and continue to accept that the defense of my family is up to me...with the weapon of my choice. An aside to the background check a d red flag warnings, check out the requirements to have a gun in my own home in Suffolk County New York. There is nothing about them that is reasonable and the laws are identical to NYC's laws that are before Scott's this Fall. Again than you for your reasoned, non-inflammatory op- ed.

I hate word correct. The word in the next to last line is S C O T U S, not Scott's. Please pardon the typos I could not find how to review my comments before I posted them. -:)

Ms Boegel is dishonest. The question is in which way. She has either lied about her qualifications to write editorial articles on legal matters. Or, she's lying about the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment. She knows, or should know, that the Amendments are not laws that can be altered or removed by acts of political whim. If so, why have them? They are specifically stated to be "inalienable" rights, given by God. And not subject to human determination. Take the Second Amendment out of the written Constitution, and NOTHING has changed. The right remains unchanged. There other area is on crime stats. The claim that CA, NY, or IL have lower gun death rates due to strict gun laws is patently ridiculous. Every study ever done proves EXACTLY the opposite. States with more guns and less gun laws constantly have lower gun crime and lower crime rates in general. Using a study or data from a group or organisation you know, or should know, to be biased or dishonest, is just as dishonest as making the data up yourself. Even using data on gun rights from either side of this issue without through vetting it's veracity is dishonest!

The rules for this site require that posts be charitable. To state flatly that someone is dishonest is the antithesis of charity. And it may even be actionable.

Amazing...Prof Boegel introduces her discussion with the following predicate:

“Legal scholars are concerned that the five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court will liberally construe the Second Amendment to thwart legislative and regulatory efforts to prevent gun-related deaths.”

Well perhaps SOME legal scholars are so concerned , but it is certainly not the whole universe of legal scholars. Besides ...exactly what constitutes and who qualifies as”a legal scholar”?. It’s a thoroughly loaded reference which effectively reads “all intelligent lawyers like myself are concerned about Republican -appointed justices”.

And how about Ms Boegel’s great choice of an operative verb...”THWART “ ....think that verb might be intended to signal that only “bad judges “ or “miscreants” are opposed to her position?

I also find interesting a liberal law professor’s interest in emphasizing the 10th Amendment as posing “a problem” that needs to be overcome. And yet if nothing else is clear, the 10th Amendment was the most direct and unambivalent statement of the Founders’ basic concern with setting up a centralized government .......Colloquially put: “ If we did not expressly grant a right/authority to The Central Government ,then such right/authority is reserved to each of the several states” Yes it impedes a lot of proposed Federal action because that is precisely what this Amendment was intended to do......that is not “a problem “ as Prof Boegel implies. One does not have to be “an originalist” to get the meaning of the 10th Amendment. It is a matter of passing interest that the The Catholic Church's renewed emphasis on “subsidiarity “ is fully reflected in the Founders original emphasis on the primacy of state and local decision making.

As a pro-life advovate, I oppose the violence of legal abortion, capital punishment unjust wars, and support stringent gun control laws. A constitutional amendment regarding any matter is difficult to pass. Also, the huge influence of the National Rifle Association adds to the difficulty. However, I believe that most polls indicate that large majorities of Americans favor stricter gun control laws. Another mass shooting on August 31 in Odessa and Midland, Texas in which a gunman killed 5 people and injured 21 others hopefully will persuade more elected officials to reconsider opposition to reasonable gun laws. In my view, increased availability of mental health services would also be helpful. After all, nearly ,two-thirds of the 39, 773 gun deaths in 2017 were suicides (Source: New York Times, December 18, 2018). Perhaps two efforts to reduce gun violence would be beneficial. First, pass a rewritten Second Amendment in the words of Zachary Elkins: guarantee the "right to bear arms, subject to reasonable regulations protecting public safety." Second, increase availability of mental health services. Even a combination of these two measures won't be a panacea to the viris of gun violence. But I believe sincere efforts to save human life are worhwhile.

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• Analysis & Opinion

The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Expanding Second Amendment Gun Rights

Law professor Darrell Miller forecasts a “radical change” in the law coming from the Court’s conservative justices.

• Darrell Miller
• Second Amendment

Amendment II 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.

UPDATE: On June 23, the Supreme Court blocked the New York law.

The Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling in a New York gun rights case that will likely expand the scope of protections the Second Amendment affords individual gun owners who want to carry a gun outside of their residences. The biggest question in  New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen  may not be whether a majority of justices strike down the state’s century-old handgun licensing requirement but how far that majority goes in signaling that other licensing measures created by government officials are now constitutionally suspect.

Can officials prohibit handguns in courtrooms and schools? What about college campuses or hospitals? When the Court heard oral argument in November, the six-member conservative majority seemed  far more interested  in exploring the contours of an expanded Second Amendment than in whether it ought to be expanded. This approach to gun regulation is a sea change from the Court’s historical approach to the amendment, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the arc of the Court’s jurisprudence in this area over the past 15 years.

The current Supreme Court is far more conservative and far more friendly to gun rights than the one that first recognized a personal right to bear arms under the Second Amendment in  District Columbia v. Heller  in 2008. Or the Supreme Court that acknowledged two years later in  McDonald v. Chicago  that such protections apply to state laws and regulations as well. Gone since then is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a foe of expanded gun rights. In her place is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose view of the Second Amendment is  viewed by many  as even more expansive than that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of  Heller .  

For many years after the  Heller  and  McDonald  decisions, Justice Clarence Thomas, an extreme gun rights supporter, urged his colleagues on the Court  over and over again  to accept more Second Amendment challenges to existing gun laws. He wanted the Supreme Court to use the newly recognized “personal” right under the Second Amendment to sweep away regulations restricting the possession and use of firearms. And for many years, until the arrival of the three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, Thomas’s colleagues  rejected those attempts .

That was then. This is now. Now we all are waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling in  Bruen , an opinion that some court watchers say won’t come until sometime in late June. This case is the challenge to New York’s 108-year-old concealed handgun law. The challengers claim they shouldn’t have to show a special need to get a license to carry a gun that way. A majority of justices seemed skeptical of New York’s rationale for the law when they asked about it during oral argument last fall. But  Bruen  is just the start of what some lawyers and advocates say will be a relentless effort by the Court to transform gun regulation around the United States.

The  Bruen  decision will come weeks after another mass shooting, another spasm of gun violence, this time in Buffalo, New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators are promising to expand the scope of gun regulations. Will the Buffalo massacre change anyone’s mind on the Court? Not likely. Nor will the massacre of 19 children and 2 teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. They were reportedly gunned down by an 18 year old who had just purchased his weapons in a state that has dramatically loosened gun laws in the past decade. It is harder for an 18 year old to get a driver’s license than a gun in Texas.

To get a sense of where we are now on the Second Amendment and where we are likely headed given the Court’s current makeup, I reached out to  Darrell Miller , a professor at Duke Law School who is an expert on the Second Amendment and gun rights and regulations. 

COHEN:  Three days after the Capitol riot and insurrection, you gave a  fascinating interview  to Olivia Li at The Trace in which you talked about an insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment. “There is always someone who thinks that tyranny is in the present” is the quote you once used to help describe the concept. It’s now been 15 months since January 6, 2021. What have you seen between now and then, among the hundreds of federal cases to arise involving the alleged rioters and insurrectionists, to support or undermine your old theory? 

MILLER:  If anything, the past 15 months have only reinforced my conviction that the normalization of threats of political violence in American society is undermining the foundation of American democracy. We’re learning through these prosecutions just how widespread and coordinated the attack on the Capitol actually was. We’re learning through the January 6 Committee how complicit a significant segment of the political, legal, and professional class was in supporting a multi-pronged attack on the peaceful transfer of power. Yet instead of seeing bipartisan condemnation of political violence, we’re witnessing ever more transparent appeals to it. I remain alarmed. 

COHEN:  What’s your view of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the Bush-era federal law that offers a  special shield to gun manufacturers  to protect them from liability for the damage caused by gun violence? Would a legislative repeal of it violate the Second Amendment? And do you get a sense from recent litigation against gun manufacturers — I am thinking of the Sandy Hook case, for example — that this avenue might represent the best chance now to reduce gun violence by holding gunmakers accountable for some of it?

MILLER:  I do not think a legislative repeal of PLCAA would violate the Second Amendment. I  do  think the Second Amendment presumes that there will be some kind of commercial market in weapons, but nothing about the Second Amendment says that market must be unregulated. Indeed, in  District of Columbia v. Heller , the Court itself said “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Right now, under PLCAA, firearms are among a handful of commercial products that are essentially immunized from tort rules that could force manufacturers and distributors to make them safer and less prone to misuse. 

It’s possible that, if PLCAA were repealed, the Court would hold — as it has in the First Amendment context with defamation of public figures — that the Second Amendment sets the lower boundary for tort rules involving weapons. It’s possible, but that would give Second Amendment rights a kind of preeminence claimed by few other constitutional guarantees. The Sandy Hook case provides a very small crack to penetrate the PLCAA immunity shield, and perhaps that will be enough to make gun manufacturers change their sales practices. However, I’m not certain that it will provide the full set of incentives — already present with other kinds of commercial products: from batteries, to cars, to prescription medication — to make a potentially beneficial product less prone to misuse.

COHEN:  Five years after he retired, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, said the idea that there was a personal right to bear arms embedded in the Second Amendment was a fraud. The Second Amendment,  he told an interviewer in 1991 , “has been the subject of 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.” That was 31 years ago. Since then, a conservative Supreme Court has ruled there is such an individual right to bear arms, a ruling that has spawned rollbacks of gun regulations across the country. To a lot of people, Burger’s comments are a sort of Rorschach test about the Second Amendment in general and gun regulation in particular. Where do you stand on it?

MILLER:  This is not a simple question. To call the personal right interpretation of the Second Amendment a “fraud” presumes a certain kind of originalist constitutional methodology. It presumes that the Second Amendment means what the Founders intended or, alternatively, what the Founding generation understood the words to mean around 1791. Few, if any, of the Founders are talking about firearms for personal self-defense against criminals during the time the Second Amendment was ratified — the debate was focused on fear of a standing army and how to organize the militia. Recent research by linguists, using big data sets of 18th-century documents unavailable when the Court decided  District of Columbia v. Heller , has pretty convincingly shown that the term “bear arms” was overwhelmingly used in a collective or military sense and almost never used in the modern sense of “carry weapons.”

So, by that metric, Burger is right. But assuming the Constitution means what the Founders intended or understood is a huge assumption. There’s a more flexible, evolving theory of the Constitution — typically endorsed by people on the left — that says the meaning of the Constitution gradually changes over time or is impacted by major public events or social movements. On that theory of constitutional interpretation, calling the personal right a “fraud” is a non-sequitur. This is the great irony of the  Heller  opinion — it’s a decision by an arch-originalist, celebrated by conservatives, that only makes sense if the Constitution is a living document.

COHEN:  We all are waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling in  New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v Bruen . Of course, I haven’t read every essay or analysis on the case or the  oral argument that took place on it last fall ,  but I have yet to come across a Second Amendment scholar or gun policy expert who says the Court’s conservative majority will side with New York and against the interests of gun owners. What’s your sense of the scope of the decision we are most likely to see here? What’s your prediction? 

MILLER:  Other than feeling very confident that the existing New York State pistol licensing law will be struck down, I have very little sense of the scope of the decision we’re likely to see in the next month or two. The justices at oral argument seemed genuinely concerned that a broad ruling on public carry would embroil them in all kinds of minutiae about where guns can be prohibited — campuses, subway cars, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, etc. I cannot believe that they have much appetite for transforming every federal district court judge in the country into a gun zoning czar. That said, there’s a conservative supermajority on the Court that is clearly ready to flex its muscles on issues that conservatives have long cared about — from abortion restrictions, to free exercise, to gun rights — so I can’t rule out a broad and broadly disruptive ruling that would upend not only New York’s regulations but would call into question the constitutionality of nearly every gun regulation, in every state, at every level of government.

COHEN:  You have written a great deal on the Second Amendment and how policymakers can and should approach the tension between gun rights and gun regulations. One article that caught my eye,  posted last year , advocated for an “equilibrium adjustment” approach to Second Amendment law, a sort of sliding scale of reasonableness that would presumably protect some existing gun laws while striking down others. Sounds optimistic to me, given what we know of the Court’s ideological makeup. Are you looking for anything in  Bruen  that would help you evaluate whether the Court is receptive to this “equilibria” approach? 

MILLER:  The primary point I wanted to make in that article is that if the Court ends up leaning heavily or exclusively on text, history, and tradition to decide Second Amendment cases, the process of reasoning from analogy from those sources has to apply equally on both sides of the rights/regulation equation. The Court has firmly rejected arguments that only 18th-century weapons are protected by the Second Amendment. But that argument should apply to regulations too — more than just those regulations that existed in the 18th century are constitutional. So, if the Court holds that new kinds of weapons — like 9-millimeter pistols — are “similar” enough to historical weapons to count as an “arm” under the Second Amendment, the Court should say new kinds of regulations — like prohibiting guns on the subway — are “similar” enough to historical regulations to be constitutional.

COHEN:  Constitutional experts who follow the courts always seem to have an eye on three or four cases that are beginning to wend their way through state court systems or the federal system. What three or four Second Amendment cases are you watching as they begin their journeys to the higher courts? Are we likely to see a challenge to these new open carry laws that so many states have adopted over the past few years? Are there other cases you see out there that could give this Court the opportunity to expand gun rights and limit gun regulation? What should we be watching for?

MILLER:  There’s a host of unsettled questions that I’m keeping my eye on. The lower federal courts right now are wrestling with the issue of what counts as an “arm” for purposes of the Second Amendment: Does it include large capacity magazines? Does it include AR-15s and other rifles modeled on military weapons? In Michigan, the state supreme court is set to decide whether the University of Michigan and other state universities can keep firearms off their campuses or whether that violates federal or state constitutional law. Then there’s the flood of litigation that will follow the  Bruen  case. I guarantee that gun rights advocates have already got plaintiffs engaged and complaints drafted and that there will be multiple lawsuits filed as soon as the Court hands down  Bruen .

But what I’m really focused on is the sleeper issue in  Bruen  that will determine just how radical a change we’re in for. Right now, the lower courts are using a two-step framework for deciding Second Amendment cases. The first step is a historical approach; the second step allows the government to justify its regulation through social science data or other kinds of empirical tools. But one issue in  Bruen  is whether that second step is permissible or whether all Second Amendment questions may be answered only by reference to what is permitted by “text, history, and tradition.”

If the Court adopts a “text, history, and tradition”-only approach to Second Amendment questions, then suddenly everything we thought we knew about gun regulation — that you can keep those convicted of domestic violence from possessing firearms; that you can keep loaded guns out of the cabins of commercial airliners — all that is up for grabs.

Disclosure: Miller was among a group of attorneys who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of neither party in the  Bruen  case, urging the Supreme Court not to apply a text, history, and tradition-only approach. He also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the pending Michigan Supreme Court case.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This discussion is one of several in a Brennan Center series on the Bill of Rights. The interview with Orin Kerr about the Fourth Amendment is  here , the interview with David Carroll about the Sixth Amendment is  here , and the interview with Carol Steiker on the Eighth Amendment is  here .

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Let’s talk about repealing the Second Amendment

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It’s hard to imagine in the wake of the most recent mass school shootings, but I recall fondly when guns were a regular part of my adolescence in Connecticut.

My large public high school had a rifle range in the basement. We on the rifle team were introverts and unathletic kids who still wanted a team sport experience. Every afternoon, our coach would unlock the flimsy cabinet that held ten .22 caliber Winchester target rifles and we would practice for matches against other state high schools.

Our safety training was rudimentary but effective; mainly “never leave a bullet in it and don’t point it at anyone.” Our worst incident was the theft of a prized shooting jacket from a rival team; an appeal to good sportsmanship eventually got it back. One day, a National Rifle Association (NRA) membership card in my name arrived in the mail.

Gun violence — murder — has escalated dramatically since the early 1970s when we fired away in that school basement. In the wake of the transformation of the NRA from a sportsman’s association to a hard right activist organization, guns are much more prevalent in American political life. Even as mass shootings become commonplace and calls for gun safety protections grow, the NRA continues to use the Second Amendment as an excuse to successfully nurture the powerful, countervailing gun rights movement.

After each school shooting, gun safety and victims’ advocates call for “common sense gun reform” while gun rights organizations accuse them of politicizing the murders and ignoring the constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear Arms…” There is little real movement on the issue.

It’s time to change this frozen political dynamic. We need to reframe the debate to address the root cause of our national inability to effectively curb gun violence. It is time to talk about repealing the Second Amendment.

Too many gun safety advocates take precisely the wrong approach by tiptoeing around the Second Amendment, meekly reassuring that they only seek very limited reforms. This cautious approach defines the margins of public debate, and therefore the range of possibilities, far too narrowly. Rather, the very existence of a loud argument about the larger issue of repeal will make those incremental proposals seem more moderate, and therefore ultimately more achievable.

We need to counterbalance gun extremists with forceful, strong positions at the other end of the political spectrum. A campaign to repeal the Second Amendment is our best option.

Using what initially seem like radical positions to make other proposals appear more moderate is a well-established communications tactic to reframe public policy debates. This practice of attempting to expand or move the range of what are considered mainstream policy positions has come to be known as “shifting the Overton window.”

One example: The notion of full government health care for every American has long been derided on the right as socialism, but the existence of the Medicare for All movement helped make the Affordable Care Act seem moderate, and therefore more possible, by comparison.

One tenet of the Overton window concept is that elected officials generally seek to stay within that range of conventional positions. Currently, the idea of a Second Amendment that negates most gun laws is so ingrained, political leaders committed to reducing gun violence are forced to uniformly state that they’re not talking about intruding on this basic right, that they are not seeking to “take away your guns.” They fear being seen as being too radical and give away too much ground, leaving the center of the debate too far to the right.

This leaves it to the gun safety movement, to teachers and students and every one of us concerned about the 35,000 Americans killed by gun violence so far this year, to take up a call to repeal the Second Amendment. It is up to gun safety advocates to be bolder and more aggressive, to provide the air cover for like-minded people in the legislative trenches to move more incremental but currently controversial measures forward.

There is evidence that a bold repeal campaign could be useful and effective. A recent academic study found that use of “Radical tactics by one flank led the more moderate faction to appear less radical…This perception led participants to identify more with and, in turn, express greater support for the more moderate faction.”

To be clear, a ‘Repeal the Second Amendment’ campaign would not be to argue that nobody should have guns, but that not everyone should be able to have assault weapons on demand. It would not mean competitive shooters and hunters and people in need of personal protection should not have guns, but it could mean that the principal obstacle to any reasonable laws would be removed.

We might not get repeal for decades, if ever, but the effort itself would broaden the range of possibility, and there would be victories along the way. Regardless of its success or failure, such a campaign could help add new energy to efforts to reduce gun violence, empower more moderate elements of the movement, and, over time, make room for compromise on much better terms. Fewer police will be outgunned, and some people considering gun violence against themselves or others will be stymied or delayed until they get the help they need. The debate itself is the first step to saving countless lives.

So let’s get started. Say it out loud: “Repeal the Second Amendment.” Say it again. Say it everywhere.

Steven R. Singer is a communications strategist and former congressional press secretary in Connecticut, and former director of communications and public affairs and adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. He captained the Hamden High School rifle team in the 1970s.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

R etired Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has an idea for addressing gun violence in America: repeal the Second Amendment.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times Tuesday, the 97-year-old former Supreme Court justice argues that advocates for stricter gun control legislation should take the next step and demand the removal of the Second Amendment entirely.

“That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform,” Stevens, who was appointed by former President Gerald Ford and was then a registered Republican, wrote. “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.”

The long-serving Supreme Court justice, who retired at the age of 90 in 2010, had the op-ed published just days after student survivors of the recent mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. led the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of other cities around the world to demand an end to gun violence.

“Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday,” Stevens wrote in the opening line of the op-ed.

Most students and advocates pushing for gun control have not gone as far to say the Second Amendment should be repealed entirely. Instead, gun control activists have pushed for the increase of the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21, the implementation of more background checks and the barring of civilians from owning semiautomatic weapons, as Stevens notes.

The former Supreme Court justice also cited the 2008 Supreme Court ruling District of Columbia v. Heller , which affirmed the Second Amendment protects the right of an individual to own a firearm without serving in a militia. Stevens, along with retired Supreme Court justice David Souter and sitting justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissented from the majority opinion in that case.

“Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option,” Stevens wrote.

The long-serving Supreme Court justice, who left the court at the age of 90 in 2010, has pushed liberal issues throughout his retirement. He has advocated for the abolishment of the death penalty and the legalization of marijuana, among other causes. His 2014 book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution proposed, among other changes to the Constitution, the rewriting of the Second Amendment to instead read: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.”

Indeed, there has only been one successful attempt to repeal an amendment in American history. That happened in 1933 with the passage of the 21st amendment, which repealed the 18th amendment, thus ending the prohibition of alcohol.

Correction : The original version of this story misstated Justice John Paul Stevens’ age. He is 97, not 98.

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Handout A: How Has the Second Amendment Been Interpreted? (Background Essay)

The Second Amendment is written differently than other amendments in the Bill of Rights. It is unique because it contains an opening phrase, or “preamble.” The preamble of the Second Amendment reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” The next part of the amendment is known as the “operative clause.” This means it is the part of the sentence with force or effect. The operative clause states that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

When people disagree about the meaning of the Second Amendment, it is usually because they disagree about the meaning and purpose of the preamble of the Amendment.

How Has the Supreme Court Ruled?

In Presser v. Illinois (1886), the Court held that states could not disarm citizens because that would reduce with the federal government’s ability to raise a militia. But the Court added, “We think it clear that [laws] which…forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” The Court also interpreted the word “militia.” They stated that a militia was “all citizens capable of bearing arms.”

In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment did not protect the right to possess all types of weapons. The Court upheld a federal law that regulated sawed-off shotguns [one type of gun that is easily concealed and often used by criminals].

The Court reasoned that since that type of weapon was not related to keeping up a militia, the Second Amendment did not protect the right to own it. In other words, the Second Amendment protected a right to own weapons. The question was how far that right went.

Why Is District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) Important?

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first time the Supreme Court interpreted what the Second Amendment meant for an individual’s right to possess weapons for private uses like self defense.

The District of Columbia had one of the strictest gun laws in the country. It included a total ban on handguns. Further, long guns had to be kept unloaded and disassembled or trigger-locked. Heller believed the law made it impossible for him to defend himself in his home. He argued that it violated the Second Amendment.

The District of Columbia argued that the preamble of the Second Amendment, which refers to militia service, secured the “right of the people” to have weapons only in connection with militia service. The city also pointed out that the law did not ban all guns, and that it was a reasonable way to prevent crime.

The Court agreed with Heller and overturned three parts of the District’s law. The Court reasoned that the preamble gave one reason for the amendment, but did not limit the right. The Court also reasoned that elsewhere in the Constitution, like in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, the phrase “the right of the people” is used only to refer to rights held by people as individuals.

Finally, the Court reasoned that the right to own weapons for self-defense was an “inherent” [natural] right of all people. “It has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a preexisting right,” the majority stated.

Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices disagreed with the Court’s ruling. The dissenters agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual right. However, they argued that an individual’s right to bear arms was limited by the amendment’s preamble. One dissenting Justice argued that the Second Amendment’s preamble showed the Founders’ “single-minded focus” on protecting “military uses of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias.”

One thing is certain. Like all other rights in the Bill of Rights (such as freedom of speech and press), the right to keep and bear arms is not an absolute right. Working out the limits of the Second Amendment’s protection continues to challenge society.

Comprehension Questions:

• In Presser v. Illinois (1886), what did the Supreme Court decide about militias?
• What are the possible results from the Court’s ruling in United States v. Miller (1939)?
• What did the Supreme Court rule in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)? How did this change or confirm the interpretation of the Second Amendment?

Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — 2Nd Amendment — Why The 2nd Amendment Should Not Be Repealed

Why The 2nd Amendment Should not Be Repealed

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Published: Dec 16, 2021

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• In Ivanhoe, what does mammock mean?
• What does rummage mean?
• Is a mummer some type of religious person?
• Some guy I don't like told his friend I was acting all demure. What does that mean?
• When I complained about our cafeteria food, my biology teacher told me he wished they'd serve agarics. Was he talking about some kind of dessert?
• Where did the name Of Mice and Men come from?
• What genre would you consider the book, The Outsiders ?
• In Fahrenheit 451, why would a society make being a pedestrian a crime?
• What does the phrase, a worn-out man of fashion" mean from Jane Eyre ?"
• Is sagacity a medical condition?
• My teacher told me I was being obdurate. Was that a compliment?
• What motives inspired Iago to plot revenge against Othello?
• Who was the first king of Rome?
• What does enervate mean?
• What is a parvenu ? I saw the word in William Makepeace Thackeray's book Vanity Fair.
• Is salubrity somehow related to being famous?
• Do capers have something to do with cops?
• What's the difference between a soliloquy and a monologue?
• In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce uses the word pandybat . What's a pandybat?
• Does the word inexorable have something to do with driving demons out of a person?
• Do people who prognosticate have some sort of special power?
• What is a hegemony, from James Joyce's Ulysses ?
• What are fallow fields ? I'm a city gal who heard the term at a 4-H fair and just read it in Anna Karenina.
• What's the difference between parody and satire?
• Lord of the Flies uses the word inimical. What does it mean?
• What does dreadnaught mean, as it’s used in Bleak House?
• I saw vertiginous in Madame Bovary. What does mean the word mean?
• What does overweening mean, in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes?
• Can you hear a dirge anyplace but a funeral?
• Does imperturbable refer to something you can't break through?
• What are the seven ages of man?
• What is a chimera , in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë?
• What's dross ?
• What is an injunction ?
• For school I had to make a Napoleon hat, which called for a cockade. What is that?
• If someone studies assiduously, does it mean they're working really hard or really slowly?
• Define mood as it relates to a work of fiction. Distinguish mood from effect.
• My sister calls me the Princess of Prevarication." What's prevarication ?"
• What's turpitude, as in moral turpitude"?"
• What's the definition of tenebrous ?
• This biography I'm reading about Queen Victoria says that she refused to remove the hatchment she had for her husband Prince Albert. What does that word mean?
• What does sine qua non mean?
• What's lugubrious mean?
• What's impugn mean, from Ivanhoe?
• What does postprandial mean?
• I love reading fashion magazines and occasionally come across the word atelier. What is that?
• What does King Lear mean when he says that ingratitude is a marble-hearted fiend"?"
• What is celerity , from Ivanhoe ?
• In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , what are disquisitions ?
• What's shrive ? My neighbor said she's been unshriven for years, but I think her skin looks quite shriveled.
• What's a dobbin ?
• What's polemic ? Over winter break, my uncle told me I was polemic and asked if I was on the debate team at school.
• I came across a list of homonyms: mu, moo, moue . I know mu is Greek for the letter m , and moo is the sound cows make, but what's a moue ?
• What does trow mean?
• In Far from the Madding Crowd , what does cavil mean?
• What does Charles Dickens mean when he says “toadies and humbugs” in his book, Great Expectations ?
• Where can I find the word naught in The Scarlet Letter ?
• I found an old diary from the 1800s where the writer describes how he almost died but was saved by a sinapism . What is that?
• I know what mulch is, but what's mulct ?
• When our teacher was introducing the next reading assignment, he said we'll be using the unexpurgated version. What did he mean?
• For some reason, the word dingle sticks in my head after having read Treasure Island years ago. I never did discover what it meant. How about it, Cliff?
• In Dracula , what's stertorous breathing?
• What does philippic mean?
• I'm usually pretty good at guessing what words mean, but have no clue about exigence . What is it?
• What's doughty ? How do you pronounce it?
• What's sharecropping? I'm kind of embarrassed to ask, because it's one of those words everyone assumes you know what it means.
• I'm working on my summer reading list with Kafka's The Trial. The very first sentence uses traduce , and I don't know what that means.
• What does the cormorant (bird) symbolize in mythology?
• I saw the word badinage in the book Uncle Tom's Cabin . Do you think that's a typo that really should be bandage ?
• On a TV modeling contest, a judge said, Her simian walk is unbelievable." Was that a good thing?"
• What is the definition of adverbiously , from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities ?
• In Oliver Twist , Dodger refers to Oliver as flash companion . Can't find a definition of this anywhere. What does it mean?
• Do elocutionists kill people?
• For my English homework, I have to write a love poem. I'm only 13 and I haven't had my first love yet. How would I go about writing about feelings that I haven't felt yet?
• Where on the body would I find my sarcophagus ?
• What's stolid ? It sounds like someone who's stupid and built solid like a wall.
• What's a wonton person?
• In which play did William Shakespeare state that misery loves company?
• What's comfit ? Is it a different way of saying comfort?
• Where did the story Frankenstein by Mary Shelley take place?
• What kind of person would a shallow-pate be?
• What are myrmidons of Justice" in Great Expectations ?"
• Faseeshis … no clue on the spelling, but I kind of got yelled at in school today for being that. What did I do?
• In The Red Badge of Courage , what's an imprecation ?
• The word portmanteau shows up in a lot of the literature I read for school assignments. It sounds French. What does it mean?
• I did something really stupid yesterday, and my grandfather told me I was hoist with my own petard." What does that mean? And what's a petard ?"
• How do you pronounce Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's early comedies?
• What's a bourse ? I read it in my finance class.
• In The House of Mirth, what are oubliettes ?
• In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, what are thimble-riggers ?
• In Wuthering Heights , what's a thible ?
• Which Hemingway story references the running of the bulls" in Spain?"
• What's a clink? My dad mentioned that his granddad was there for a long time during World War I.
• If somebody is toady," does it mean they're ugly?"
• Who said all's fair in love and war" and where?"
• Why is there so much talk about baseball, especially Joe DiMaggio, in The Old Man and the Sea ?
• In the movie Failure to Launch , there's a line that goes, Well, she certainly is yar," in reference to a yacht. What's yar ?"
• What does mangle mean in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities ?
• I got detention because a teacher said I was being contumacious . What's that?
• What are encomiums?
• What are billets in The Three Musketeers ?
• In Orwell's 1984 , what is doublethink ?
• What are orts ? That's a weird word that reminds me of orcs from The Lord of the Rings .
• What are alliteration and assonance?
• How is John the Savage's name ironic in Brave New World ?
• What's quinsy?
• What is a doppelgänger?
• What is New Historicism?
• I found the word unwonted in a book I'm reading. Is that a typo, you think?
• In Heart of Darkness , what does cipher mean?
• In the play The Glass Menagerie, would you describe Tom as selfish?
• What does Kantian mean, from a philosophical perspective?
• What's a colonnade ? My girlfriend is freaking me out with stories of her dream wedding where she walks down a colonnade. I know this is the least of my problems, but I'm curious.
• My grandma says she knows how I feel when I knit my brows. Is she crazy?
• Why is Shakespeare's play titled Julius Caesar , even though he is dead by Act III and plays a relatively small role?
• I know bier has something to do with dead people, but what is it exactly?
• My brainy brother owns a Harley and says his girlfriend is the pillion . Is he insulting her or just showing off?
• I ran across the word mien in a book. Is it a typo?
• Is a younker a person or a place?
• Does precipitancy have something to do with the weather?
• I'm writing a grade 12 comparative essay, and I need a book that I could compare with All Quiet on the Western Front. Any suggestions?
• A friend says she suffers from ineffable sadness. What's ineffable ?
• What's a scow ?
• Is a maelstrom some kind of dangerous weather?
• What is the meaning of this saying, The cat will mew and dog will have his day"?"
• What is a paradox ?
• The Picture of Dorian Gray mentions a panegyric on youth. What does that mean?
• In Madame Bovary , what's a mairie?
• In The Kite Runner, what's palliative mean?
• So what's oligarchy ? In government class, my teacher mentioned that word when we were talking about the Blagojevich scandal in Illinois.
• Is intrepidity a good thing or a bad thing?
• My grandmother told me that she thinks grandpa should see an alienist. Does she think he's from another planet or what?
• Do you have to have licentiousness to get your driver's license?
• I ran across the word hardihood in something I read the other day. Is it some kind of clothing?
• I saw mention of haversack in my history book. What does that word mean?
• I'm guessing the word quadroon is four of something. But what's a roon?
• I'm trying to understand Shakespeare's play, King Lear . Can you explain these quotes from Act 1, Scene 1?
• In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , what's a samovar ?
• I came across a music channel that featured tejano," and then I saw the same word when I was reading Bless Me, Ultima. What does it mean?"
• In The Awakening , there's a term prunella gaiter." I'm guessing that gaiters are a type of covering for your legs, like the gaiters I use on my ski boots to keep snow out. But what the heck is prunella? Is it a purplish color like prunes?"
• What's sedulous mean?
• In Chapter 2 of Jane Eyre , what are divers parchments ?
• A friend of mine said she hopes to get a counterpane for Christmas. What's that?
• In Wuthering Heights, what does munificent mean?
• The other day, my dad called my friends a motley crew. Is that his way of saying I should hang out with a different crowd?
• Why is there an authorship problem with Shakespeare?
• What is it called when something is out of place in time, like a jet stream in a movie about ancient Rome?
• In 1984 , does Winston die from a bullet at the end of the book or is he in a dream-state?
• I saw some old guy in a soldier's uniform selling fake red flowers. He said it was for Veterans Day. What's the connection?
• I was kind of flirting with this really cute boy when my teacher told me to stop palavering. Did she want me to stop flirting or stop talking?
• My grandmother says when she was a kid in China, she became Catholic because of the Mary Knows nuns. I tried to look that up on the Internet but couldn't find anything. Can you help?
• In The Count of Monte Cristo , does cupidity mean love? I'm guessing that because of, you know, Cupid . . . Valentine's Day.
• My theater teacher called me a name the other day. I don't think it was supposed to be a compliment. What's a somnambulist, anyway?
• Why was Tartuffe such a jerk?
• To Kill a Mockingbird has this word fey in it, but I don't know what it means. Does it mean short lived or fleeting?
• In Pride and Prejudice , what's probity" &mdash
• I never met my grandma, who my mom says lives in a hovel and wants her to move in with us. Then I saw that word in Frankenstein . What's a hovel? I thought it was like a place that had room service.
• I have a friend who said something about phantasmagoric. That's not real, is it?
• Which of the following literary devices is used in these poetic lines by John Milton?
• In Faulkner's A Rose for Emily," what does noblesse oblige mean?"
• What is love?
• What is suggested by the coin image in Book II of A Tale of Two Cities ?
• Why does Satan rebel against God?
• I'm reading Candide, by Voltaire, and one of the dudes is an Anabaptist. What's that?
• What does the poem Summer Sun" by Robert Louis Stevenson really mean?"
• What did Shakespeare want to say about his beloved in Sonnet 18?
• In Romeo and Juliet , who was the last person to see Juliet alive?
• What is the Catechism?
• What is the overall meaning of the poem Before The Sun," by Charles Mungoshi?"
• What does ague mean?
• Is there a reference to venereal disease in Romeo and Juliet ?
• What is fantasy fiction?
• What is the exposition in Othello ?
• Who is the character Susan in Romeo and Juliet ?
• What is a found poem?
• What did Alice Walker mean in the essay Beauty"?"
• Why did Dr. Frankenstein create his monster?
• What is the name of the surgeon and the English ship he's on in Moby-Dick ?
• What are the differences between an epic hero and a Romantic hero?
• In Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, does Gail Wynand commit suicide or only close The Banner at the end of the novel? I'm in a literary dispute over this!
• What did W.E.B. Du Bois mean when he wrote of second-sight?
• What is nihilism, and what should I read to get a better understanding of it?
• What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?
• What are intelligent design and creationism and how are they related?
• What is misanthropy ?
• I would like to understand the poem Blight" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Please help."
• Can you explain the significance of the question, Which came first, the chicken or the egg?""
• In Little Lost Robot," by Isaac Asimov, why have some robots been impressioned with only part of the First Law of Robotics?"
• Can you explain Cartesian Dualism and how Descartes' philosophical endeavors led him to dualism?
• When reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , what does entailment mean?
• What does ignominy mean? (From Shelley's Frankenstein )
• What does pecuniary mean? (From Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities )
• How do I analyze Kant's philosophy?
• What is an apostrophe in Macbeth ?
• Is music a language?
• Why should literature be studied?
• In the book The Scarlet Letter , what is a vigil ?
• The first week of school isn't even over yet and I'm already in trouble — I forgot my textbook at school and can't do my homework! What should I do now?!
• What are the renaissance features/characteristics in Hamlet ?
• What is the exact quote in Hamlet about something being wrong in Denmark? Something smells? Something is amiss?
• What does Utilitarianism mean, from a philosophical perspective?
• What was the form of English that Shakespeare used?
• At the beginning of Act V, Scene 2 of Much Ado About Nothing, does Shakespeare insinuate that anything is going on between Margaret and Benedick?
• What was the "final solution" in the book Night by Elie Wiesel?
• With the many novels out there, is there a database of some sort that can narrow down your choices to a specific book of interest for pleasure reading? And if not, why hasn't there been?
• How do you pronounce Houyhnhnms ? (From Swift's Gulliver's Travels )
• I just took the quiz on The Great Gatsby on this site. How can Jordan Baker be described as a professional golfer? To my knowledge, the LPGA did not form until the mid-1950s. Shouldn't she be referred to as an amateur golfer instead?
• What are the humanities?
• If Father, Son, and Holy Ghost aren't names, what is God's name?
• What classic novels take place in Florida?
• In which Hemingway short story is the saying, "Children's shoes for sale"?
• Who is the "lady" that Robert Plant speaks of in the song "Stairway to Heaven"?
• Was Odysseus the one who planned the Trojan horse, in the Trojan War?
• How do I get my smart-but-hates-to-read son interested in reading?
• Poetry gives me problems. How can I figure out what poems are about?
• How do you analyze a novel?
• What does it mean to ululate ? (From Golding's Lord of the Flies )
• Is ambrosia a salad? (From Homer's The Odyssey )
• What is a harbinger ? (From Shakespeare's Macbeth )
• What does it mean to be refractory ? (From Dickens' Great Expectations )
• What is a querulous kid? (From Wharton's Ethan Frome )
• What does the word runagate mean? (From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet )
• What is the word, imprimis ? (From Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew )
• What does the word alchemy mean? (From Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter )
• What is an estuary ? (From Conrad's Heart of Darkness )
• What or who is a scullion ? (From Shakespeare's Hamlet )
• What is a schism ? (From Swift's Gulliver's Travels )
• What does it mean to be salubrious ? (From Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights )
• What is a replication ? (From Shakespeare's Hamlet )
• What is vicissitude ? (From Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables )
• Can you define indolent ? (From Wharton's House of Mirth )
• What does the word replete mean? (From Shakespeare's Henry V )
• What are orisons ? (From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet )
• What does it mean to be ephemeral ?
• What does it mean to be placid ? (From Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre )
• What is a paroxysm ? (From Stoker's Dracula )
• My English teacher got really mad when I said I was nauseous . Why?
• What does it mean to be farinaceous ? (From Tolstoy's Anna Karenina )
• What does dejection mean? (From Shelley's Frankenstein )
• What is animadversion ? (From Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter )
• What does it mean to be timorous ? (From Shakespeare's Othello )
• Someone called me erudite . Is that good?
• What is a mountebank ? (From Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter )
• What does incarnadine mean? (From Shakespeare's Macbeth )
• What does it mean to be puissant? (From Shakespeare's Julius Caesar)
• What is a purloiner? (From Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities)
• What does it mean to be affable ? (From Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment )
• What does it mean to be ostensible ? (From Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court )
• What does compunction mean? (From Dickens's Bleak House )
• What is behoveful ? (From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet )
• What is a precentor ? (From Golding's Lord of the Flies )
• What does it mean to be loquacious ? (From Cervantes's Don Quixote )
• What does imprudence mean? (From Ibsen's A Doll's House )
• What is a conflagration ? (From Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde )
• What does it mean to be spurious ? (From James' Daisy Miller )
• What is a retinue ? (From Swift's Gulliver's Travels )
• What does the word forsworn mean? (From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet )
• What does the word hauteur mean? (From Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby )
• What are vituperations ? (From Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl )
• What are ostents ? (From Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice )
• What is a sockdolager ? (From Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn )
• What does insuperable mean? (From Shelley's Frankenstein )
• What is calumny ? (From Shakespeare's Hamlet )
• What is an augury ? (From Sophocles' Antigone )
• What does squally mean? (From Dickens' Great Expectations )
• What does corporal mean? (From Shakespeare's Macbeth )
• What does it mean to be plausible ? (From Sinclair's The Jungle )
• What is a dearth ? (From Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre )
• What does it mean to vacillate ? (From Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest )
• What does it mean to obtrude someone? (From Dickens's Great Expectations )
• What is a heterodox ? (From Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter )
• What is felicity ? (From Austen's Emma )
• What does it mean to be effacing ? (From Adams's The Education of Henry Adams )
• What is a repast ? (From Chan Tsao's Dream of the Red Chamber )
• What does insouciance mean? (From Sinclair's The Jungle )
• What is a soliloquy ? (From Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn )
• I was reading The Iliad and there's this word in it: greaves . What's that?
• What does the word prodigality mean? (From Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby )
• Is there an easy way to understand The Canterbury Tales ?
• What does the scarlet letter symbolize?
• What is the significance of Grendel's cave in Beowulf ?
• How did Hawthorne show that Hester Prynne was a strong woman in The Scarlet Letter ?
• What purpose do the three witches serve at the beginning of Macbeth ?
• What can you tell me about Grendel from Beowulf ?
• What figurative language does Stephen Crane use in The Red Badge of Courage ?
• Why is Roger so mean in Lord of the Flies ?
• How do Gene and Finny mirror each other in A Separate Peace ?
• The old man and the young wife — what's up with story plots like this?
• What part does vengeance play in The Odyssey ?
• What kind of a woman is Penelope in The Odyssey ?
• Do fate and fortune guide the actions in Macbeth ?
• How does Frankenstein relate to Paradise Lost ?
• How has the way people view Othello changed over time?
• How does Henry change throughout The Red Badge of Courage ?
• What's so great about Gatsby?
• How is To Kill a Mockingbird a coming-of-age story?
• Why did Ophelia commit suicide in Hamlet ?
• What is the setting of The Scarlet Letter ?
• What is a slave narrative?
• What's an anachronism ?
• Doesn't Raskolnikov contradict himself in Crime and Punishment ?
• What is the main theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ?
• What does Shakespeare mean by memento mori ?
• What are inductive and deductive arguments?
• How does Alice Walker break the rules" of literature with The Color Purple ?"
• What role does Friar Laurence play in Romeo and Juliet ?
• Why did Elie Wiesel call his autobiography Night ?
• How does Shakespeare play with gender roles in Macbeth ?
• Where did Dickens get the idea to write A Tale of Two Cities ?
• What's the purpose of the preface to The Scarlet Letter ?
• What role do women play in A Tale of Two Cities ?
• Who are the heroes and villains in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
• What are the ides of March?
• Was Kate really a shrew in The Taming of the Shrew ?
• What role does innocence play in The Catcher in the Rye ?
• How are Tom and Huck different from each other in Huckleberry Finn ?
• What is blank verse and how does Shakespeare use it?
• How do the book and film versions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest differ?
• What is a satirical novel?
• What is the role of censorship in Fahrenheit 451 ?
• How can I keep myself on track to get through my summer reading list?
• How does Jim fit into the overall theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ?
• What is a major theme of The Great Gatsby ?
• How does Shakespeare use light and darkness in Romeo and Juliet ?
• Who is the narrator in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily"?"
• In Lord of the Flies , what statement is William Golding making about evil?
• How is The Catcher in the Rye different from other coming-of-age novels?
• How does Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird show two sides?
• Was there supposed to be a nuclear war in The Handmaid's Tale ? I couldn't tell.
• What is experimental theater"?"
• Does Jonas die at the end of The Giver ?
• What is an inciting incident, and how do I find one in Lord of the Flies ?
• How does King Arthur die?
• In Julius Caesar , what does this mean: Cowards die many times before their deaths
• How do you write a paper on comparing a movie with the book?
• Please explain this Kipling quote: Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.""
• What is a tragic flaw?
• What is a motif, and how can I find them in Macbeth ?
• Why didn't Socrates write any books? After all, he was supposed to be so intelligent and wise.
• Why are there blanks in place of people's names and places in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ?
• Was Othello a king? A prince? He's referred to as My Lord" but I'm not sure of his actual title."
• I need to download some pictures of Juliet. Where would I find these?
• Why does Odysseus decide to listen to the Sirens, in The Odyssey , by Homer?
• What does prose and poetry mean? What's the difference?
• In The Scarlet Letter, why is the scaffold important and how does it change over the course of the novel?
• Why does the legend of King Arthur hold such a powerful grip over us?
• Do you like to read books?
• What are the metrical features in poetry?
• What are the riddles that Gollum asked Bilbo in The Hobbit ?
• Can you tell me what these two quotes from Much Ado About Nothing mean?
• What is connotation, and how do you find it in a poem?
• What is a dramatic monologue?
• What is formal fallacy?
• In the movie Dead Poets Society, what are some themes and values that are relevant to Transcendentalism. What is Transcendentalism?
• Why didn't Mina Harker realize she was under Dracula's spell when she witnessed her friend fall prey to him, too? Wasn't it obvious?
• In The Three Musketeers by Dumas, Cardinal Richelieu is labeled as the villain. How could he be presented as a hero instead?
• In Romeo and Juliet , what are the different types of irony used? Um, what's irony?
• What is the main theme in Fahrenheit 451 ?
• In Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities , what fact in Book the Second: Chapters 1-6, confirms Darnay's release?
• Why is Invisible Man considered a bildungsroman?
• In A Doll's House , what risqué item does Nora reveal to Dr. Rank that eventually prompts him to disclose his own secret?
• What is a definition of short story?
• What percentage of people are considered geniuses?
• How do I write and publish my own novel?
• Do I use the past or present tense to answer this question: What is this poem about?" "
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• In what countries does Toyota produce and market cars?
• How would you use the PDSA cycle in your personal life?
• I am confused about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing negative numbers.
• Who are some famous female mathematicians?
• Given the set of numbers [7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42], find a subset of these numbers that sums to 100.
• The speed limit on a certain part of the highway is 65 miles per hour. What is this in feet per minute?
• What is the sum of the angles of an octagon?
• In math, what does reciprocal mean?
• How many grams in an ounce?
• A number is 20 less than its square. Find all answers.
• How much is 1,000 thousands?
• How do I find the angles of an isosceles triangle whose two base angles are equal and whose third angle is 10 less than three times a base angle?
• Explain with words and an example how any number raised to the zero power is 1?
• If I had 550 coins in a machine worth $456.25, what would be the denomination of each coin?
• What three consecutive numbers add up to 417?
• How many 100,000,000s in 50 billion?
• Of 100 students asked if they like rock and roll or country music, 7 said they like neither, 90 said they like rock and roll, and 57 said they like country music. How many students like both?
• What's the formula to convert square feet into square meters?
• In math, what is the definition of order of operations?
• What's the difference between digital and analog?
• What is the square root of 523,457?
• What are all of the prime numbers?
• Our teacher told us to look for clues in math word problems. What did she mean?
• How do I figure out math word problems (without going crazy)?
• What good is geometry going to do me after I get out of school?
• I keep forgetting how to add fractions. Can you remind me?
• My teacher talks about the Greatest Common Factor. What's so great about it?
• Got any tips on finding percentages of a number?
• What does associative property mean when you’re talking about adding numbers?
• How do I use domain and range in functions?
• How do I change percents to decimals and fractions? How about decimals and fractions to percents?
• What should I do if my teacher wants me to solve an inequality on a number line?
• What is a fast and easy way to work word problems?
• How do you combine numbers and symbols in an algebraic equation?
• How do I go about rounding off a number?
• What is the First Derivative Test for Local Extrema?
• Can you describe a prism for me?
• How can I double-check my answers to math equations?
• How do you factor a binomial?
• I get the words mean , mode , median , and range mixed up in math. What do they all mean?
• How do you combine like terms in algebra?
• Can you make it easier for me to understand what makes a number a prime number?
• Explain probability to me (and how about some examples)?
• Solving story problems is, well, a problem for me. Can you help?
• What's inferential statistics all about?
• Finding percentages confuses me. Do you have any tips to make it simpler?
• What's a quadratic equation, and how do I solve one?
• How do you figure out probability?
• How do you add integers?
• How do you use factoring in quadratic equations?
• What are limits in calculus?
• I've looked everywhere to find the meaning of this word and I can't find it. What's the definition of tesseract ?
• In geometry, how do you get the perimeters of a square and a rectangle?
• What is the absolute value of a negative number?
• A rectangle swimming pool is 24m longer than it is wide and is surrounded by a deck 3m wide. Find the area of the pool if the area of the deck is 324m 2 . Where do I even start to solve this problem?
• How do you classify numbers, as in rational numbers, integers, whole numbers, natural numbers, and irrational numbers? I am mostly stuck on classifying fractions.
• How do you convert a fraction to a decimal or change a decimal to a fraction?
• I am trying to find all solutions to this algebra (factoring) problem, x 3 – 3x 2 – x + 3 = 0, and I keep getting the wrong answer. Please help!
• Sometimes when I'm doing my pre-calculus homework I need help on some of the problems. Do you know where I can find help on the weekends or whenever?
• How do you convert metric measurements?
• I'm curious about converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, or Fahrenheit to Celsius. How do I convert from one to the other?
• In basic math, the fraction bar shows division. So why does this equation show multiplication instead of division? 9/9 = 1 because 1 x 9 = 9.
• I'm taking geometry and I'm having problem with the angles and the degree. Is there a way you can help me out?
• The perimeter of a rectangle is 66m. The width is 9m less than the length. What is the length and width of the rectangle?
• How many dollars are in 5,000 pesos?
• How many ounces in a pound?
• I'm having a hard time remembering percent of change. All I have is P (percent) = amount of change over original amount. Is there a better way of understanding it?
• How do I figure out tangrams?
• What are quadrilaterals?
• What is the least common multiple of 8, 6, and 12?
• How do you convert decimals to fractions?
• How did the planet" Pluto get its name? I know it's named after the mythical god of the underworld, but why?"
• What is the difference between the earth's core and its crust?
• What does gender really mean?
• What does plum pudding have to do with physics?
• What is the functionalist perspective in sociology?
• What does pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis mean?
• Why aren't viruses considered living things?
• Why does your breathing rate increase when you exercise?
• Everyone says you shouldn't clean your ears with cotton swabs because you could break an eardrum. But if you do break your eardrum, will it grow back?
• What is a mole?
• How, and why, is body fat stored?
• Where on the body do you find ciliated pseudostratified columnar epithelium?
• Since she was only married for 72 days, does Kim Kardashian have to give back her wedding gifts?
• In the United States, how can you get buried at sea?
• What exactly is Salvia divinorum , and is it legal?
• What is the composition and volume of whole blood?
• Should I refer to a widow as Mrs., Miss, or Ms.?
• Is it possible to catch more than one cold at a time?
• Why does the Earth have more gravitational force than the moon or some other planet?
• Did humans evolve from monkeys or apes?
• What is the largest organ in the human body?
• How did we end up with both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales?
• What is absolute zero?
• What is cell theory?
• How come when humans flatulate, it smells bad?
• How do I convert mL into µL, and vice versa?
• What is the most abundant element in the earth's crust?
• Is global warming man-made?
• What exactly is wind? And why does it blow?
• This sounds really disgusting, but I'm curious: Can humans drink animal blood, or any other kind of blood?
• Why is space exploration important?
• How is photosynthesis essential to life on earth?
• What is the highest mountain in New Mexico?
• What's the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist?
• Who are the unbelievers" referred to in The Koran? What is it that they do not believe?"
• What is the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites?
• What happens when you die?
• Why is it important to memorize where the 50 states are on a map?
• What kind of endangered species are there? Can you give me some examples, please?
• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open, so when you drive a car, is it against the law to sneeze?
• What are tectonic plates?
• I have boy trouble. I want to ask out my friend, but I am not sure he is going to say yes. Plus, he said he had a girlfriend when we talked during school. Plus, my parents don't want me to date.
• Why is the sky blue?
• Do you really shrink at the end of the day and then grow in the morning?
• What is the difference between matter" and "mass"?"
• What does "nature versus nurture" mean?
• What are closed contour lines?
• What is homeostasis ?
• What does the periodic table look like?
• Do you know anything about the law of conservation of energy? Is it really a law?
• I thought I knew what work means, but my physics teacher defines it differently. What's up with that?
• How do plants know when to drop their leaves?
• What's the surface of the moon like?
• How does the number of neutrons in the nucleus of an atom differentiate it from another atom?
• How do big rocks wear down over time?
• What does genetic recombination mean?
• How has DNA matching really made big difference in finding out who committed a crime?
• What's the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems?
• What is incomplete dominance?
• Can hydrocarbons be considered compounds?
• Can you explain what molar mass is?
• Aren't fungi really plants?
• What information is contained in a chemical equation?
• What are the endocrine and exocrine systems?
• How do electrical charges interact?
• Are there more than three kingdoms of life? I can never remember.
• What are the characteristics of electrically charged objects?
• How does anomie theory explain deviant behavior?
• Why would anybody think there might be life on another planet?
• What are chemical solutions?
• Do you know of any way to simplify the overall subject of biochemical genetics?
• Can a loud noise really shatter glass?
• How do magnetic fields work?
• Did Clarence Darrow really call an animal in to testify at the famous monkey trial?
• What role does the thyroid gland play in the human body?
• What did Mendel discover about heredity when he was playing around with plants?
• How many laws of motion did Newton come up with, and what are they?
• What in the world is constructive and destructive interference?
• How do viruses do their dirty work?
• What do bones do, except give us a skeletal structure?
• Do all viruses look alike?
• My teacher keeps talking about solubility. What does that mean, anyway?
• How do positive and negative reinforcement work?
• How does nondisjunction relate to birth defects?
• With all the germs in the world today, how come everybody's not sick all the time?
• What is thermal equilibrium?
• How are sound waves created?
• What do taste buds look like — up-close?
• How often does an eclipse happen?
• What is the chemical composition of saltwater?
• I was told to write a 15-sentence answer to this question: When in life do you learn to expect the unexpected? I don't really know of an answer. Can you help me figure it out?
• My school is having a blood drive and I am considering donating blood. Can you tell me more about the whole process and if it is painful?
• Where can I download music for free? And if I do, is it illegal?
• How do I convince my parents to give me ten bucks?
• How should I deal with being a perfectionist?
• How do I convince my little brother and sisters to stay out of my room?
• Can you eat a rooster?
• How do I work out a problem with a teacher who loses the assignments I turn in and then accuses me of not doing the homework?
• Could a Tyrannosaurus rex kill King Kong?
• How would you describe a rainbow to a person who has been blind their ENTIRE life and doesn't understand colors?
• Will a tattoo inhibit hair growth?
• When did gays come about?
• I was wondering if the tilt on the earth's axis is important to animal life on earth. Could you explain?
• What are the four types of tissue found in the human body?
• Is there any easy" way to understand the Krebs Cycle?"
• Why are prostaglandins sometimes called tissue hormones?
• What is cell death? And what is the difference between apoptosis and necrosis?
• How do I find the molar mass of the elements on the periodic table?
• What do the symbols on the Periodic Table mean? For example, Gold-Au, Silver-Ag, Lead-Pb, Potassium-K, Tin-Sn, Iron-Fe, and Mercury-Hg, where did these symbols come from?
• How is your mind connected to your dreams? Does this have anything to do with psychology?
• What are the three main functions of the skeletal system?
• What are the characteristics of a moneran, protist, and fungus?
• Why does a placebo work? And who does it work for?
• What are two properties of metals, nonmetals, and metalloids?
• What is lymph? Is it part of the circulatory system in our bodies?
• Can there be life on Mars?
• How much of the ozone layer is left?
• Is it possible for a marine mammal to be infected with rabies?
• What exactly does the RNA do?
• What is the sperm travel process?
• What is a bacterial colony?
• Dealing with the myth of Cinderella, written by the Grimm brothers, how could you analyze it in terms of archetypes that Carl Jung used?
• What exactly is blood clotting and what are the processes involved?
• What is the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission?
• Does a person have to have the same blood type as his or her brothers and sisters?
• My teacher said that eating poisonous mushrooms can make you sick or even kill you, but that they're not the only fungus that can. What is she talking about?
• What is the chemical equation for orange juice?
• What kind of structures are opposable toes?
• What is an oral groove?
• Dogs are spayed, but humans have hysterectomies. Isn't it all the same surgery?
• What does the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) do?
• What is the angle formed by a horizontal line and a line of sight to a point below?
• After I take the ASVAB, what is my obligation to the military?
• If I choose to take the computerized version of the GRE, will I be typing or writing my analytical and issue essays?
• Are there any MBA programs that don't require the GMAT?
• Can you use a calculator on the GMAT? What are you allowed to take in with you to the test?
• Should I keep taking the GMAT until I get a good score?
• How is the ASVAB scored?
• I canceled my GMAT score right after I took the test. Now I'm wondering if I did the right thing.
• What is the ASVAB AFQT?
• Where can I take the ASVAB?
• Is it better to guess on GMAT answers or would that count against me?
• How is my GMAT score used by grad schools?
• Is it true that the writing assessment sections of the GMAT are graded by a computer?
• What kinds of scores are reported on the GRE, and how long will it take for me to get my scores?
• What do I need to bring with me to the GRE testing center?
• How are GRE scores used?
• How do I learn stuff for in-class exams?
• How do I get ready for a math test?
• Can I take a calculator to my ACT exam?
• Do you have any tips for doing well on the AP Chemistry test?
• What can I expect in the math part of the SAT?
• How can I prepare for the SAT essay?
• What is the Critical Reasoning section of the SAT like?
• Is there a fun way to learn SAT vocabulary?
• What books should I read for the AP English Literature exam?
• How can I make sure I finish the AP essay question in time?
• Since I made the soccer team, I don't feel like I have enough time to study. Do you have any study tips so I can use my time better and make sure I don't get kicked off the team for my grades?
• I'm a huge procrastinator. How can I manage my time effectively to catch up on my assignments?
• What kind or amount of note-taking is optimal? I get lost while making a notation and miss other parts of the lecture.
• I study so hard for my tests that I know I know the material, but then I always panic and bomb. How can I reduce my test anxiety?
• I do really bad on quizzes. I'm okay with tests and homework, but I do horribly on quizzes. What can I do to prepare for quizzes?
• I've screwed up horribly this semester. I always say I'm going to change my habits, but I always end up getting lazy and doing something else. I want to succeed, but how can I get rid of my own laziness?
• If you have any music or audio notes playing on tape, CD, or whatever and you fall asleep, is it true that you'll have whatever was played memorized by the time you wake up?
• I have trouble understanding a book when I read. I try to read so that I can finish the book quickly but still understand what's going on. Could you give me a few tips on how to understand a book while reading at a quick pace?
• What is the best study method when trying to cram three chapters all at once?
• What if I have a really bad memory? When I read a page of a book, I can't go back and remember it.
• Why do some teachers say light a peppermint candle? I mean, I don't think it helps you concentrate.
• I really suck at taking multiple choice tests. Do you have any suggestions for not psyching myself out before a big test?
• Is there a WRONG way to study?
• Are the math questions on the GMAT extremely difficult and complex?
• Does it matter whether I take the SAT or ACT in my junior year or my senior year of high school?
• What does AP mean?
• How can I explain to my friend what I mean when I call him tedious ?
• Does the word privations has something to do with the government?
• What's the difference between goulash and galoshes?
• What exactly is a parallel structure?
• I have a bet on this: Learnt is a real word, right?
• Is a boor somebody who boos or somebody who bores?
• Somebody in my drama club used the word ostentation the other day. What does that mean, anyway?
• Define paraphrasing.
• What's another word that means the same thing as malevolence ?
• I find the same typo in a lot of books I read. Shouldn't connexion be connection ?
• What do you call a word that only ever appears as a plural?
• What s the difference between like and such as
• Can you show an easy way to remember when to use I" or "me" in a sentence? (And please skip the technical grammar rules.)"
• Should I say, “Can I have a banana?” or “May I have a banana?”
• Is the proper capitalization Atlantic ocean or Atlantic Ocean ?
• What does the word supercilious mean?
• Is grippe something that makes you sick?
• Does the word elucidation have something to do with drugs?
• How would you use fervid and fervent in a sentence?
• How can someone become a good writer?
• How do you cite CliffsNotes in APA, MLA, and CMS styles?
• What period in history does histrionics cover?
• People used to die from consumption. Does that mean they ate too much?
• Is it ever okay to start a sentence with the word but?
• What is the longest word in the English language?
• I'm learning English now, so I gave myself an English name — Vivi." However, an American told me that "Vivi" is not suitable for a name. There are some local reasons. So I want to know if "Vivi" really can't be used as a name."
• When writing a paper, what do I do to the title of a book? Do I underline it or italicize it?
• Please look at this sentence: Both Peter and John like soccer. Should it be: Both Peter and John likes soccer.
• What are the four genders of noun?
• What is it called when a word is the same both forward and backward?
• Do swans really sing when they die
• What does indignation mean?
• What is a pundit ?
• What is a cleft sentence
• What is the difference between narration and first person?
• Is it grammatically correct to say take some shots"?"
• My teacher thinks I plagiarized an essay; what should I tell him?
• Why do some authors use the word an before all words that start with an H? Is this form of writing correct?
• My school newspaper claimed that I am. is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. Isn't Go. a complete sentence?
• How did people make up the lb. abbreviation for pounds?
• Which is correct: "if I was" or "if I were"? And why?
• How would you use the word antecede in a sentence?
• Could you please explain the difference between affect and effect ?
• How do I write a good thesis statement?
• What do people mean when they talk about information in the public domain?
• What's the big deal about plagiarism, anyway?
• Is there a difference between envy and jealousy ?
• Can you define the words prostate and prostrate ?
• What does it mean to be threadbare ?
• Is there a difference between the words ignorant and stupid ?
• I used the word reoccur in a paper and my teacher said it should have been recur . Can you tell me the difference?
• What does it mean to be flabbergasted ?
• When should I write the word lose and when should I write loose ?
• What does ad infinitum mean? (From Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre )
• Do loath and loathe have different meanings?
• I got marked down on a paper for using the word irregardless . Why?
• What does it mean to be fastidious ? (From Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo )
• Do stationary and stationery mean the same thing?
• How is the word among different than the word between ?
• What is a hierarchy ?
• What is the difference between tortuous and torturous ?
• Can you help me understand the difference between the words censor and censure ?
• I get farther and further confused. Can you help?
• I can t keep principal and principle clear Can you help
• My teacher lowered my grade on a paper because I described a scene as grizzly . I thought that was a word.
• Are the words gamut and gauntlet interchangeable?
• When do I write some time instead of sometime and sometimes ?
• Can you help me figure out when to use the word lay instead of lie ?
• Can you tell me when to use faze instead of phase ?
• What is the difference between avenge and revenge ?
• What is the difference between the words precede and proceed ?
• How do I fix a run-on sentence?
• How useful are automatic spell-checkers?
• Is it okay to begin a sentence with and ?
• When is it okay to use sentence fragments?
• What is future perfect tense?
• Is it okay to split infinitives?
• Why do people often confuse than and then in writing?
• When do I use commas with clauses?
• How do I decide which type of pronoun to use when I have multiple pronouns?
• What types of words or phrases should I avoid in my writing?
• What is parallel structure in writing?
• When should I use apostrophe-S?
• What is a clause?
• I have to write an essay, and I'm having a hard time getting started. Do you have any tips?
• How can I make the most out of my first draft?
• What should I avoid when writing the conclusion of a research paper?
• Are can and may interchangeable?
• What is passive voice?
• What does it mean to be quixotic ?
• What are linking verbs?
• What does it mean to use redundant adverbs?
• How do I organize a comparison essay?
• How do I decide between who and whom ?
• How do you use possessives in front of gerunds?
• Can I end a sentence with a preposition?
• How do I decide on the scope of my essay?
• What are participles?
• What's the difference between will and shall ?
• Which adjectives can't be modified with more and most ?
• What are indirect objects?
• Should I use his , his or her , or their ?
• What's the difference between farther and further ?
• What is a storyboard?
• What exactly is a theme of a story, and how can I recognize it?
• Why is English class called English in school? English is a language, so I don't think it should be a class. Please help me understand.
• What is tone exactly and how do you find it in stories?
• Where do you start when writing a character analysis?
• What is a dynamic character? What is a static character? How are they different?
• What's the difference between description and narration?
• I don't get onomatopoeias! It's as hard to spell as it is to understand!
• What is a gothic tale?
• What is the author's style" of a book?"
• What is a one-word sentence called?
• What word class would the word Novembery fit in to?
• My instructor wrote on my paper to be careful about using passive voice. What does that mean?
• Is it grammatically correct to say, She went missing"? What is the rule?"
• I need information on the social roles of language. How are individuals judged based on their use of language?
• What is the origin of the word promotion ?
• What's a preposition?
• What are some examples of homographic terms?
• I have to write an essay for my AP world history class and my teacher said to use direct comparison, but I'm confused on what he means by that. Please Help!
• I'm reading The Scarlet Letter in my Honors AP English class and my teacher wants us to do a 5 paragraph essay. What's the best way to start the introduction?
• What are some examples of transitions that I can use in my writing assignment?
• What does APA stand for?
• In typing a term paper, what is the proper spacing after a period? I think I've read that one space is now acceptable.
• What is meant by argue your own thesis?
• How do I write an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph?
• What are easy ways to identify figurative language?
• When writing a persuasive essay, what words can take place of being verbs," such as is, are, has, be, were, and was? My teacher crossed all of those out of my paper? What words should I use to replace those?"
• I have to write a dialogue that might take place between the speakers of The World Is Not a Pleasant Place to Be" and "Where Have You Gone." What exactly is a dialogue?"
• What is the literary device of writing exactly as a character speaks, even if words are misspelled and the grammar is non-standard?
• What are the types of tones/attitudes in writing?
• What are the first-person, second-person, and third-person points of view? Which is used for formal essays?
• What is a good sentence for the word plinth ?
• What are footnotes and endnotes? How do I start off a title page?
• Why can't you be rude or sarcastic in your thesis statement?
• How do you write a paper, when the topic is yourself? How do you research that kind of thing?
• What would a raging river be like?

Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson decided not to run for a third term as president. Historians say this indicates that the founding fathers implied that U.S. presidents should limit themselves to two terms. As a result, almost all presidents prior to the passing of the 22nd Amendment self-imposed a two-term limit on themselves. Only Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson ran for a third term (all lost). Theodore Roosevelt became president after William McKinley's assassination and he tried to run for a second term (he also lost).

Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only president to serve more than two terms (he was elected to four terms, but died during his fourth term). It's believed that Roosevelt's long run was because the American people didn't want to change leadership during World War II. But almost immediately following Roosevelt's death, the 22nd Amendment was introduced and ratified.

Since then, many Congresspersons have introduced symbolic bills to eliminate the 22nd Amendment, but these are never taken seriously. As of this writing, 22 such bills have been introduced in the last 20 years alone, under every president since Ronald Reagan (including Barack Obama). But not one of these bills has been brought to a vote. They're considered a nod to the current president by his congressional supporters, and nothing more.  

Nearly everyone who participates in the political process believes that the 22nd Amendment is important. It gives the American people more opportunity for choice in their leadership; it prevents one person from becoming some sort of monarch or dictator.

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Michelle Goldberg

Trump Says Abortion Will Be Left to the States. Don’t Believe Him.

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

When Donald Trump was asked about the recent Florida Supreme Court decision upholding his adopted state’s abortion ban, he promised that he would announce where he stands this week, a sign of how tricky the politics of reproductive rights have become for the man who did more than any other to roll them back. Sure enough, on Monday, he unveiled his latest position in a video statement that attempted to thread the needle between his anti-abortion base and the majority of Americans who want abortion to be legal.

Trump’s address was, naturally, full of lies, including the absurd claim that “all legal scholars, both sides,” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, and the obscene calumny that Democrats support “execution after birth.” But the most misleading part of his spiel was the way he implied that in a second Trump administration, abortion law will be left entirely up to the states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case the law of the state,” said Trump.

Trump probably won’t be able to dodge the substance of abortion policy for the entirety of a presidential campaign; eventually, he’s going to have to say whether he’d sign a federal abortion ban if it crossed his desk and what he thinks of the sweeping abortion prohibitions in many Republican states. But let’s leave that aside for the moment, because when it comes to a second Trump administration, the most salient questions are about personnel, not legislation.

Before Monday, Trump had reportedly considered endorsing a 16-week national abortion ban, but the fact that he didn’t should be of little comfort to voters who want to protect what’s left of abortion rights in America. Should Trump return to power, he plans to surround himself with die-hard MAGA activists, not the establishment types he blames for undermining him during his first term. And many of these activists have plans to restrict abortion nationally without passing any new laws at all.

Key to these plans is the Comstock Act , the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent , filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.” Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never actually repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies believe they can use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor general and the legal mind behind the state’s abortion bounty law, told The New York Times in February. Mitchell is very much a MAGA insider; he represented Trump in the Supreme Court case arising from Colorado’s attempt to boot the ex-president off the ballot as an insurrectionist. As The Times has reported , Mitchell is on a list of lawyers vetted by America First Legal, a nonprofit led by the Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, as having the “spine” to serve in a second Trump administration.

Mitchell is far from the only Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock back from the dead. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of major right-wing think tanks, has published a 920-page plan for a new Trump administration, “Mandate for Leadership.” In it, Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s vice president and a former Trump Department of Justice official, lays out an agenda for the department to target abortion medication.

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.” (“Mandate for Leadership” also says that a Trump F.D.A. should repeal approval for medication abortion.)

A resurrected Comstock Act wouldn’t just stop women from ordering abortion pills through the mail. It could also prevent doctors and pharmacies from dispensing them, since neither the Postal Service nor express carriers like UPS and FedEx would be allowed to ship them in the first place. And it would give the Justice Department a rationale for cracking down on the networks that help provide pills to women in states with abortion bans.

Some interpretations of the Comstock Act might curtail surgical abortion as well, since supplies used to perform them travel through the mail. Abortion could remain legal in some states but become nearly impossible to obtain.

Some anti-abortion leaders, knowing that their schemes are unpopular, don’t want Trump to talk about them before he’s in office. Speaking of Comstock, a movement attorney told The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey: “It’s obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal ban, and see if that works.”

That is clearly what Trump is trying to do. Whether it works is up to all of us.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

The Twenty-second Amendment is an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms—and on democracy itself.

Lost in the Left’s endless babbling about Donald Trump’s alleged threat to democracy is a very simple but inconvenient truth: Trump’s re-emergence as the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 is a triumph of democracy.

Not only did Trump secure the nomination following his defeat in 2020—a rather incredible feat in and of itself—but did so in spite of every obstacle the mainstream media, the Republican establishment, and the lawfare apparatus have put in his way.

The primary voters and caucus-goers who chose Trump did so in spite of January 6, the prosecution of the former president, or even the popularity in some MAGA quarters of Ron DeSantis. They chose him because they damn well felt like it. 

This is democracy in action: The voters surveyed the scene, tuned out the noise, and selected the man the rest of the world loves to hate. What could be more democratic than voting for your preferred candidate against the advice—the warnings, the threats, the fear-mongering—of your betters?

Yet, even if Trump returns to the White House this November, the Twenty-second Amendment will bar him from standing for re-election in 2028. Ratified in 1951, the amendment is largely seen as a kind of constitutional course correction following the four consecutive presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The amendment reads, in part: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

This sounds reasonable enough, especially in light of FDR’s hold on the office. Yet those who supported the amendment more than 70 years ago could not have foreseen the prospect of a one-term president who lost the office but who later regained it in a subsequent election. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to have successfully vaulted himself to the White House in nonconsecutive elections, in 1884 and in 1892. (Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, also gave it a try by running as the Progressive Party standard-bearer in 1912.)

In modern times, it is virtually inconceivable that any of the ousted one-term presidents would have seriously thought of running anew against the same opponent (now the occupant of the White House) who had bested them four years earlier. (Think about it: George H.W. Bush running against Bill Clinton in 1996?) This is not a reflection of a weakness in their character but the reality of American public life: Voters are fickle, and by the end of the first term of any presidency, they have long forgotten the loser from four years earlier. 

As the primary season has shown us, the Republicans have not moved on from Trump—yet the Twenty-second Amendment works to constrain their enthusiasm by prohibiting them from rewarding Trump with re-election four years from now. 

This is plainly unfair. Indeed, there has long been support for axing the Twenty-second Amendment due to the artificial limits it places on voter choice. Many popular presidents have agreed. In 1985, the  Washington Post  reported that Ronald Reagan supported repealing the amendment, saying in private remarks that the lame-duck label being applied to his second term left him feeling “handicapped.” In 2016, Barack Obama told David Axelrod that he was sure he would have coasted to a third term if such a thing were permissible: “I am confident in this vision, because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could have mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.” 

The case of Donald Trump, however, makes an even more forceful ethical argument against the Twenty-second Amendment and for its repeal: If a man who once was president returns, after a series of years, to stand again for the office and proves so popular as to earn a second nonconsecutive term—as Trump seems bound to do—to deny him the right to run for a second consecutive term cuts against basic fair play. If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?

Don’t let questions of Trump’s age in four years fool you. 

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Besides the glaringly obvious differences between the men in their brain power, physical strength, and ability to walk in a straight line, Trump and Biden are about four years apart, making this issue something of a wash. If Trump wins in November and would be eligible to run for re-election in 2028, he would be 82 years old during that election—the same age Biden will be later this year. And at the end of Trump’s hypothetical second consecutive term, in 2032, he would be 86—the same age Biden would be at the end of his second term if he is returned to the White House. 

Conservatives have gritted their teeth for years as the Left, in their hatred of Trump, has attempted to pervert the meaning of first the Twenty-fifth Amendment and, more recently, the Fourteenth Amendment. The case for repealing the Twenty-second Amendment is far more straightforward: As with Prohibition, it is simply a matter of finding the will to get rid of a bad idea that needlessly limits Americans’ freedom. 

Trump in 2028! 

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