According to Bill Press, a senior political commentator for CNN, the Second Amendment should be repealed because it is the “only effective method” of dealing with gun violence. He says “it is clear from the text of the Amendment is not about individual gun ownership; no connection to self-defense; and no connection to assault weapons.”
“When it comes to the aftermath of widespread shootings, history repeats itself,” he said in a Thursday op-ed for CNN titled “There’s no way to fix the Second Amendment. Let’s just get rid of it.”
According to Press, Biden’s ideas “come close to what is really required,” yet they’re “not enough to persuade some conservatives that the Second Amendment is not an open license to use guns, even with military-style weapons.”
“Many conservatives and judges interpret the Second Amendment in a total con job way,” Press writes. “They think it’s a license to kill as many Americans with as many weapons as you want,” he added.
His proposed solution is removing the Second Amendment altogether.
“The only way to properly handle the Second Amendment is to remove it and then change it with something that makes more sense in a modern civil society,” he added.
“It’s clear from the wording of the Second Amendment itself that it has nothing to do with individual gun ownership, self-defense, or assault weapons,” he continued. “The amendment refers not to the freedoms of well-armed people but only to those belonging to a group called a ‘well-regulated militia’.”
The historical record tells a different story, however. According to The Washington Post, for example, the country’s founders “had no intention of including guns in the original Constitution,” and that the Second Amendment was only included later “to gain the backing of White supremacist Virginians” for the document’s ratification.
To support his position, he quotes anti-white Emory University professor Carol Anderson, who claims that the Second Amendment has “repression” and “anti-Blackness” at its core.
It will not be easy to repeal the Second Amendment, according to Press, who says that it “has no connection to self-defense or the ability to own any sort of weapon.”