Premise: The 2nd Amendment is repealed using proper measures.
Would you accept such a repeal, or deny its legality?
How do you think various factions will react?
What about sort range and/or long range results of such an action?
Repealing the 2nd amendment would require such a huge shift in politics that the results of the repeal itself would be incredibly tiny compared to the results of changing the political beliefs of Americans to such an extent that the repeal is a possibility.
I’d welcome such a repeal.
I think pro 2nd Amendment advocates would fight it tooth and nail and there would be protests and threats of 2nd Amendment remedies along with lots of “cold dead hand” rhetoric. In the end, I think people would accept it, many grudgingly.
Long range outlook – aside of the dramatically reduced gun related crime rate, America might just become a little less of a Yosemite Sam caricature.
One word: war.
Agreed. If the premise were true, it would be entirely different country, so I’m not sure how one would go about making predictions. If things were very different, then things would be very different.
N.B. I’ve long been an advocate for repeal, but I’m in the minority.
Given that repeal requires a 2/3rds vote in Congress and 37 states to ratify it, we’d already be in broad agreement on it and it would not cause a civil war. That’s the wisdom of the amendment process. Civi wars start when countries are divided 50-50. They don’t start when countries are divided 80-20, or if they do, they are pretty short. If there was broad agreement among Americans to give up our guns, 90% of us would give up our guns, 9% would hide them, and 1% would die.
Where you get into problems is if Democrats try to repeal the 2nd amendment through other means. Such as getting Heller overturned and then passing broad gun control laws. But those problems would be resolved through democratic processes anyway. Democrats would get booted out of office and their gun bills mostly rolled back.
People love their guns so much that they would be willing to kill and die for them?
No doubt a handful of mentally unstable individuals would act out, but do you think the roughly 1/3 of the population who owns guns would go to war with the rest of the country?
Repealing the second amendment must be possible by legal means or else our constitutional framework means little. But that avoids the bigger issues of the origin of our rights and whether rights can be actually revoked instead of merely suppressed or unprotected.
For example, if the first amendment were repealed by legal means, then our government might no longer protect our right to peaceably assemble. But I would deny we did not have that right–only that it might become more difficult to peaceably assemble. Likewise repeal of the second amendment would not remove our right to arm ourselves, but instead make it more difficult to exercise that right.
Why would we repeal the second amendment? Presumably to reduce the number of gun deaths.
Repealing the second amendment by itself would do little. Reducing gun deaths would also require a reduction in the number of guns. And that is where the problems could arise. A paradigm like that for automatic weapons would very slowly attrite the number of guns in a way to minimize conflict. On the other hand, ATF agents going door to door to confiscate guns would not reduce gun deaths in the near term. We’d need sane policies to disarm the populace.
To argue against the premise of the original post, I’d suggest reducing the number of guns is more important than repealing the second amendment. Demographically, the number of people who keep guns has been declining for decades. We need to find ways to accelerate that decline. While people have the right to arm themselves, that doesn’t mean they must do so. (If I may use myself as an example, I support the right to arm oneself, but I do not own and do not allow firearms on my property.)
Yes, but the process of making that shift in politics might be best advanced precisely by the process of debating the value of the repeal legislation. You don’t change politics without making people think about it.
No doubt! Armed insurrection would commence!!
All those Law-Abiding Citizens suddenly no longer abiding the law!
Remember that only the 2nd Amendment is repealed in this hypothetical. All federal, state and local laws still stand…unless and until they are reviewed by the courts.
Does that include laws that were overturned in previous court rulings for being in violation of the Second? They’d suddenly come back into life.
That 1/3 figure is just admitted gun owners and is likely very inaccurate.
About as many people will give up their guns as gave up alcohol during prohibition or their illegal drugs.
Protecting ones family is more important than obeying a bad law.
Protecting them from who?.. Ze Germans??..
It would probably make things even more divisive than they are currently. Certainly, to actually get this passed would be such a shift that it’s hard to say what the country would even look like. My WAG is that repealing the 2nd would be the least of the changes in such an environment.
Of course, I’d accept it. It’s the reason we have the mechanism in our system and there is precedence in repealing an Amendment. I’d actually feel better about an above-board repeal than the sneaking underhanded tactics attempted in the past, to be honest.
What would they even be in such a changed America? My guess, again, would be that the anti-gun group would have to be very powerful and would have to include a large percentage of the population to really make this work…and have been so for a fairly long period of time. Repealing an Amendment is, by design, not an easy thing, so I’d guess maybe a decade of groundwork would have to have been done and a large number of Americans on board with it. Equally obviously, in such a scenario, the pro-gun groups would have become very weak and a large number of Americans would be actively against them.
No idea. Assuming a large number of Americans were actually on board, I suppose you’d have a massive turn in of firearms if, after getting rid of the 2nd the next step was to make firearms and ammo illegal and call for a turn in. How would that be handled? Gods know…we’d be talking about hundreds of millions of guns and 100’s of millions or billions of rounds of ammo that would have to be sorted and disposed of. Logistically, I can’t imagine what that would entail or cost. And afterward, even if only a small percentage of Americans were opposed, there would still be millions, probably 10’s of millions (maybe 100’s of millions) of no illegal firearms in the US. My WAG is that the violence wouldn’t change that much in the US, it would simply shift (or maybe not). Suicide would be pretty much exactly the same, as I think it’s a sunk cost…the method would simply change, and perhaps the number of failed attempts would go up so there might be more survivors (depending on what it changed too). Perhaps, eventually, gun violence would go down, but hard for me to imagine that if people can get access to illegal drugs that getting illegal firearms or ammo would be a major hurdle.
If the politicians simply repealed the second amendment and then went home patting themselves on the back for a job well done then nothing would happen. But if they then continued, they could enact laws like the following:
- Limiting or eliminating the sale of ammo to private parties (and aggressively squelching black market sales)
- Limiting or eliminating the sale of guns to private parties.
- Officially recognizing the public carrying and brandishment of a gun as being a deliberate threat to others and a crime on its own.
It wouldn’t be wise to send officers door to door taking people’s guns away - or necessary, probably. Given a few decades the bullets will run out on their own anyway.
Criminals? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Rampaging self-righteous liberals?
Just like the drug war, right? I mean, eventually, I’m sure the cocaine and heroin will just run out. 
Similar to how, eventually, Americans totally stopped drinking alcohol during Prohibition…
Doesn’t this point of view assume that owning a gun is just as addictive as cocaine, heroin, or alcohol? Or if not that, what qualities of gun ownership do you think compare to the taking of mind-altering substances in order to make this analogy?