Sure, Repeal It

Tom Beaver: Yep, I'm in favor of repealing the Second Amendment. Do we still have laws permitting the hanging of horse thieves? No, those laws serve no modern purpose, and now would only be harmful, and so have been retired. Likewise, the Second Amendment was put on the books to address a need we no longer have—civic defense in the absence of a paid, trained, professional soldiery. If we want an Amendment that arms us for hunting and self defense, then we need a new amendment, or amendments, written for those specific purposes. We need to stop pretending the Second Amendment means what it doesn't. Consider a law establishing the right to drive cattle herds through towns. Laws like that must have existed once. But now, a law to that effect would have outlived its necessity, and therefore could—and arguably should—-be sunsetted, even if we had been construing that law to allow the driving of cars through towns.

We get to make the laws we need. We're not limited to the laws our great-great-grandparents needed. Nor required to keep a law alive once it has become useless, or worse.

Jeff Stache: Might as well. The amendment hinges around The Militia, an arm of the government which has not existed since 1904.

Tom Beaver: I think many of us are afraid to say just how strongly we feel that guns are bad for society. "I'm not against guns, I just think we should…" Well, I am aganst guns. Not everywhere in the world, but in America. There's a bizarro mentality about guns here. People think of them as almost a holy relic, like they're the bones of the Founding Fathers. And see guns as an implicit permission to tolerate horrific fantasies of slaughter as legitimate solutions to complex societal problems. It's hard for Americans to imagine a world where shooting someone to death is as awful as killing them by any other means. Americans (speaking in the large) are not mature enough to have guns. If countries had parents, ours should be saying, "I don't care what the other countries let their kids do, I'm not letting my kids have guns. Not until you're a lot more grown up. Four hundred years old might even be too soon, from how you've been behaving."