Should the Second Amendment be repealed?

I want to see if there is a significant proportion of liberals or progressives that are in favor of repealing the Second Amendment.

Yes. I regard it as an immensely destructive force in the US; and given how it floods the whole region around us with guns the Americas in general. It also is regularly used as a tool to convince people to give up or oppose their own civil rights and those of others.

Shall Not Be Infringed!

Maine has always been quite clear as well…

Maine Constitution Article 2;

Pre 1987 wording;
“Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for the common defense; and this right shall never be questioned.”

Post 1987 wording;
“Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms; and this right shall never be questioned.”

Maine also has Permitless Concealed Carry (no CCW license needed, but is available for reciprocity with other states) PCC was signed into law on Oct. 15, 2015

I voted Yes but I’m not from there.

Concerning Maine : so it could never be questioned but they rephrased it in 1987 to change the meaning ? Wonders never cease.

Well sure. I haven’t heard of this clause before, but the meaning pre-1987 is clear to me. Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. One could argue that every citizen has the right to keep arms for the common defense in case everyone is called out to defend the state, but this clause didn’t give anyone the right to bear arms until that call is issued. They didn’t like that result so they specifically wrote a clause that gives everyone the right to own and carry weapons whenever they want. Very different things OMHO.

I voted no because it is clear that a very substantial portion of the US population feels very strongly about owning and carrying weapons. I don’t like it, but the cost of banning the weapons is too high.

What we should be doing is educating everyone on how to live safely with weapons in society. That is, reach a point where the gun owners feel safe enough in their basic right to have guns for them to accept reasonable restrictions on ownership and use. Every gun owner I know believes in gun safety and is also afraid of the slippery slope. We have to get the country to the point where there is no perceived or real slippery slope toward banning guns outright, then we can work on reasonable restrictions that everyone including gun owners would accept.

I agree. I grew up in Louisiana with a father that was a gun dealer, a world-class marksman and completely militant about gun safety. We had three shooting ranges at our house that I could use any time I wanted with my choice of the myriad of properly stored firearms we had at any given time.

The exception was if either me or my brothers did absolutely anything to violate gun safety procedures. I did that exactly once and it was with a small BB gun and not a firearm. I was mad at my little brother. He was about 125 yards away at night and I made the most improbable shot of my life. I shot my BB gun at an upward trajectory and heard him scream about 6 seconds later when it came down and hit him in the neck. It only made a little dot but he told my father and that was the only time in my life that he lost his shit on me. He didn’t beat me but he picked me up, gave me a look of complete shame and then slammed me down into a chair. I deserved it in retrospect because I could have just as easily hit my brother in the eye and done real damage.

I am extremely strict about gun safety procedures to this day. If anyone points one towards me, I am going to find a way to disarm them and then stay away. I don’t worry about gun crime so much because there is little you can do when criminals want to kill one another. However, I have zero sympathy for so-called shooting accidents. Those are completely preventable whether they are mistaken targets by hunters or kids getting ahold of a gun and thinking it is a toy. You can prevent many of those incidents through education and real commonsense safety enforcement.

Large-scale gun control as a whole is a political non-starter though and people should just give up on it. All it will do is cost otherwise candidates elections.

You can ignore the 1987 amendment. The original wording affirms that the right is “to keep and bear arms for the common defense”, and any attempt to amend that provision obviously involves questioning the right as originally stated, which is consitutionally impermissible. So the amendment must be invalid. Or something.

It’s a problem with no easy solution. Obviously the “right to bear arms” was necessary when the nation was young, but that necessity has outlived its usefulness. Certainly everyone has the right to defend themselves, but against what? Other people who are armed? The government? The same government who protects our right to bear arms? At this point, if all guns suddenly disappeared, I certainly wouldn’t miss them. But that’ll never happen. With there being more guns than citizens, there’s no way to ban them without leading to an outright civil war. It would help if we could just ban assault weapons, but that’s not gonna happen either.

I think the bottom line is: If Americans didn’t own guns, we’d just blow each other up, or drive our cars into each other, or kill each other with drones. Killing is killing, and getting rid of guns wouldn’t change that.

I believe the rewording was to clarify a court decision where a convicted felon was trying to claim the earlier version allowed him to possess firearms

history and elaboration here

Another factor in the pro/anti 2A conflict has to do with the rural/urban dichotomy, I’m a rural guy, I love the country and can’t stand cities, too many people, too close together, give me space And privacy, to we rural people, firearms are tools, dangerous tools that must be treated with respect and never misused or improperly used, no different than any other dangerous tool, like a chainsaw or electric woodworking tools, or powered farming equipment.

We grow up around guns, and are taught by our parents how to safely and responsibly use them…

If I had grown up in a city and my only experience with firearms was from the media, or from firearms violence, I may have grown up with a different view on firearms.

I can understand someone’s negative feelings towards firearms if they’ve had bad experiences with them, but that doesn’t give them the right to restrict my rights for something I had NOTHING to do with, none of my firearms have ever been raised in anger, or injured or taken the lives of anyone, and I hope they never will, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to restrict my ownership just because you’re afraid of them, or had a bad experience with them.

To roll out that overused cliche//meme…
If “guns kill people”, all mine must be defective

I don’t object to your position but

How exactly are you going to disarm them?

If it were repealed, people would still have the right to bear arms, unless and until laws were in place to restrict the bearing of arms. Such laws would still have the burden of showing that they are not an infringement on the pursuit of happiness.

Consider the right to transport yourself and your belongings from one place to another. There is no amendment to grant people that particular right, but it is still considered a natural and self-evident right, and was treated as such when people traveled by horse-powered conveyances. It ceased to be a natural right when motors were installed in carriages, at which time the government, in the interest of public safety, regulated them. The mere fact of regulating them has had little effect on reducing their numbers.

Similarly,. absent a second amendment, the government would have needed a compelling interest in order to regulate the bearing of arms. And excessive regulation would similarly face the hurdle of natural and self-evident rights.

So the fact is that Americans, with or without the second amendment, would have the power of the majority to deem the need for any regulatory legislation compelling in the interest of public safety.

I chose no, in part because I identify a great deal with what MacTech said, but also in larger part because I feel like repealing peoples rights that are expressly codified in the constitution is a bad thing to do, it sets a very very bad precedent that will be used in the future by government to become more oppressive and repressive.

A gun is a tool I’ve needed from time to time living out in the boonies. I’ve shot a rabid fox. I’ve dispatched a mortally wounded, suffering deer.

Although we have a police force (one full time cop, two part time) calls to 911 are sometimes shunted off to the state police who are 30 to 45 minutes away. Never had an intruder, but the shotgun under my bed and the .357 mag in my dresser drawer might be needed if we did.

Yes, but do you understand that many people don’t grow up around guns? I personally have never even seen one that wasn’t in a cop’s holster.

The greatest legal scholars of our time seem unable to comprehend the words “shall not be infringed.” Obviously we need to better scholars in those black robes. Hopefully the events of November will start moving us in that direction.

The only way it outlives its usefulness is if there are no threats that the police can’t deal with before they get to you. When the movie Minority Report becomes a reality we won’t need guns. Until then, we have to protect ourselves until the police arrive.

My support for the interpretation of the 2nd is absolute, as is my desire to see it repealed. As long as it is in place, then there should be no restrictions on possessing a firearm. Even gun rights advocates usually make exceptions for criminals, mentally ill, and spousal abusers, etc. I do not make those exceptions, a constitutional protection is a constitutional protection (is a constitutional protection).

HOWEVER, since the 2nd stands as the rock-in-the-road to any sensible way forward, logic tells me the 2nd should be repealed. Then we can talk about the details.

Also, I find it disingenuous that so many have internalized the notion that repealing the 2nd would automatically mean all guns would be rounded up everywhere from everyone immediately. No one is suggesting that, no one has suggested that, no one will suggest that, ever. You don’t have a constitutional right to own a car, prescription medication, knife, or any other product that is known to be able to kill a person (as we are so often reminded), yet they are widely possessed.

“No one” suggests guns should be confiscated? Are you kidding me? MANY people on these very boards are adamantly and outspokenly in favor of confiscation.

That is part of the reason even sane gun owners reject even reasonable gun control measures: because they know the anti-gun forces won’t be content with reasonable measures.

And that is the definition of a paranoid fantasy.