Repeal the Second Amendment, palladium of death

What needs to be emphasized is that there is nothing even remotely conservative about the gun lobby's position or the position of those that would turn the Second Amendment into an absolute right of individuals 'to keep and bear arms.' Indeed, it is the very antithesis of conservatism, and it is in the name of genuine conservatism that we should demand that the Second Amendment is repealed. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger was certainly a conservative and he said explicitly that the idea that there was an individual right to bear arms was "a fraud." Referring to the NRA, Berger claimed on PBS that the Second Amendment, "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."

For nearly two hundred years the general legal consensus was that the right to bear arms was not an individual right but the right for those called to military service – that is, the militia. And as Berger points out, if according to the Second Amendment "the militia – which was going to be the State army – was going to be 'well regulated,' why shouldn't 16, and 17 and 18, or any other age persons, be regulated in the use of arms, the way an automobile is regulated?" If he were writing the Bill of Rights now, he said in 1991, "There wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment."

Let us takes those words to heart, once and for all, and move to repeal and replace the Second Amendment lest this dreadful idol we have made continues to demand ever more innocent blood.