No Longer Active Shooter Reported In San Bernadino, Calif.

Yeah, if you're okay with one in a million odds, then sure. It's possible.

So it will never happen. Cool, I was worried for like a millisecond.

Somehow we agree. Just probably not for the same reason.

Exactly.

Ready to admit its possible yet?

Anything is possible, except for this. But sure prove us wrong and tell us how you plan on three-fourths the states to agree on changing the 2nd amendment.

Another civil war is actually more possible than the 2nd amendment getting changed.

Sorry to inform you that wouldn't change a thing.

Is the chance > 0%? Yes. That also applies to the chance of me being abducted by aliens tomorrow.

Sure, lets go with that. Only the beach has a 239 year old wall that has never been dented by the waves.

So now the problem is you don't like how the message is delivered. This is stupid. No one wants to chase your goalposts.

Why are they always complaining about goalpost when they are obviously playing dodgeball.

Lol. It's irrelevant how I personally view how the message is delivered. What's important is how the nation as a whole views how the message is delivered. Tone, context, delivery, etc. all matter but most people don't want to modify their message because they'd rather be condescending, self-righteous jerks about it and still think they can get their way. They can't have their cake and eat it too.

Haha changing something from the bill of rights via direct amendment is impossible no matter how many states backed it. The US Constitution is amendable but certain rights are considered inalienable and protected from removal. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear on this and they are the ones responsible for interpreting was is and is not legal. What would have to happen instead is each state would have to call a new Continental Congress, which would then send representatives to either write a new Constitution or reword the current one. After this you would need 3/4ths of the member stats to ratify it.

The first ten amendments, created from the original bill of rights and federalist papers, are treated as a built in extension of the Constitution and would require radical reworking outside of the normal amendment process to legally remove. Getting a normal amendment passed is hard enough but getting an entirely new Constitution created is outright impossible.

And yes the Supreme Court has already determined that the right for the citizens to arm themselves is fundamentally different then the right for those same citizens to organize into militias. The federalist papers spell out pretty clearly that the writers deliberately wanted an extremely well armed population as both a deterrent from invasion and as a protection against a despotic tyranny from overthrowing the government. Remember these men were all considered traitors to the British Crown and guilty of high crimes against England. They had just created an insurrection and fought a bloody revolution and overthrew the British colonial government. One of the tactics the British used prior to the war starting was mass confiscation of firearms in an attempt to disarm the citizenry to make it easier to suppress any rebellions. The drafters were very intimately experienced with this practice and wanted to make damn sure it never happened again.

So what the progressives are wanting to do was specifically forbidden by the original writers using the same document that granted us the right to vote, the right to chose our own religion and the right to express our dissent. By removing the second amendment you might as well rename the USA to the "Democratic Peoples Republic of North America" and rescind all state sovereignty.

That's the way I remember it being explained. I wasn't about to go looking for the intentionally ill-informed though. Just getting 3-4th the states to agree would never happen let alone calling up a constitutional convention over it.

I think 42 states are needed though, not all of them. I seem to remember them needing more than 3-4th to call it but not 50.

I might start using this one as the United Socialist States of America is getting old.

Here's the simple* method to repealing the 2nd Amendment and getting those guns off the streets:

1) Propose an amendment, in this case the 28th amendment. It would probably look something like this:


Section 2 is there because of Coleman v. Miller determining that amendments should be subject to a "reasonable" time period for ratification - usually seven years, but that isn't set in stone. Any time limits beyond that would probably send the amendment to the Supremes for review. Now that you have proposed the amendment, there are two ways to approve it and send it to the states for ratification:

2a) Pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority (290 votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate, assuming full chambers at the time of the vote.)

OR

2b) Propose and pass the amendment at an Article V Convention of the states by a simple majority vote (26 states.) Note: There has never been an Article V Convention as calling one would require two-thirds of the state legislatures (34) passing an bill of application for the convention, all based on the same subject matter.

This is already a very, very high bar to clear. But for the sake of argument we'll assume that one way or another, the amendment is sent to the states for ratification. Now you need:

3) 38 of the 50 state legislatures must ratify the amendment in the seven year period (or whatever accepted "reasonable time" is in the amendment.) If 13 states refuse, the amendment is dead. From a logistical partisan perspective, Republicans currently control 31 of the 50 state legislatures and another 8 are split between both parties. If you see a path to either flip 27 legislatures to the Democrats or convince Republicans to repeal, I'm open to your ideas but I have little faith in them at this time. Assuming you get this far...

Congrats! You got rid of all the guns!

Wait. No, you didn't. All you did was remove the "Shall not be infringed" language. You opened up the ability of the federal government to regulate guns more strictly. You could add language banning all civilian gun ownership in the amendment above, but I'd wager that if ratifying a straight repeal is a pipe dream, ratifying a repeal + blanket ban is a pipe dream's pipe dream. So now you need to...

4) Pass laws restricting or banning guns. You'll have to do this in ways that push the 45 states that have their own gun protections in their state constitutions to either get rid of them or start court challenges to the legality of those constitutions in a post-28th Amendment world. Assuming you get past this hump, you now need to...

5) Convince the approximately 106 million gun owners (who until recently were law abiding citizens that suddenly own banned goods - and are probably voting out the people trying to get steps 1-4 accomplished before we even get to this step) to give up their estimated 350-400 million guns. This would probably start with a voluntary buyback or turn-in program like was done in Australia. In a best-case scenario, you'll pull in somewhere between 20-33% of the guns with that (as Australia did.) So now you're still looking at well over 200 million guns still in circulation, spread out across 318 million people and nearly 4 million square miles of land mass. So now it's time to...

6) Use force. Begin state, county, city, street-by-street, door-to-door sweeps with the police and the military to search every home, tear up every yard, and get every gun. You'll need to search over 120 million households. You'll need to convince the courts that these mandatory searches aren't violations of the Fourth Amendment (especially as the searches enter the poorer and majority-minority areas of our big cities) and you'll probably lose a lot of good men and women to the likely 10% (or more) of now illegal gun holders that would take the "cold, dead hands" quote to heart and take out as many government agents as they could before those hands go cold and dead. And the more members of the police and military lay down their lives in order to search and seize the guns, the more likely those police forces would start refusing to do the searches or outright defect in fear of their own safety.

At best, the confiscation would make nightly news as this or that search goes wrong and people are dead on both sides. At worst, the opposition to the gun grab would centralize and grow into an organized opposition. On the small scale, you would see guerrilla warfare, assassinations, improvised terrorism and bombings. A larger scale opposition could easily spark a full-on second Civil War. Even 10% of gun owners deciding to commit to an armed revolt would mean a fighting force 10+ million strong, many of which would be current or former military/police/trained shooters.

The government would probably win, given enough time and enough courage to essentially carpet bomb or nuke its own citizenry. But would they? And if they did, would the international community/the UN allow it to happen or decide that international intervention would be necessary?

TLDR if you want to repeal the 2nd Amendment you need a paradigm shift in politics at both the state and national level and the will to enforce a nationwide police state until the guns are gone, while also sustaining that national will in the face of a massive armed rebellion of people who before the 28th Amendment were law abiding citizens. So is it possible? Sure. Will it? No.

*IT IS NOT SIMPLE AT ALL! HAHA I TROLL U

Also, if you believe that the door-to-door confiscation of guns is at all reasonable or possible, then Mr. Trump's plan to remove the ~10-15 million illegal immigrants should be child's play.

The cases representative of this are

Robertson v. Baldwin


The right to self defense and the ability for a citizenry to secure their nation is not created by the 2nd Amendment. The 2nd Amendment merely attempts to clarify and describe it. That right existed before the Constitution and is considered an inalienable natural right. Like all rights it is not unlimited and specific exceptions may be made, but no general ban or exception can be created.

Downes v. Bidwell determined that once a territory was considered incorporated and protected by the US Constitution, it was always and forever considered protected and that protected can not be removed by any federal or state government. A state can not remove 2nd amendment protections from its citizens no matter the wording of the law, neither can the federal government remove it from a US incorporated territory.

United States v. Cruikshank

United States v. Miller

Aka you can't ban "scary military looking weapons" nor can just broad generalizations be used.

District of Columbia v. Heller


Again reaffirmation that the right to carry a weapon exists without the Constitution.


It should be pretty obvious now that you can't "ban guns" by "removing the second amendment". The second amendment doesn't create a persons right to own and carry a weapon, it merely clarifies it. In order to institute a general purpose ban on weapons you would need to rewrite the Constitution such that it specifically excluded this from being a natural right.

So yeah a Constitutional Convention is required. Good luck with that.

Outside of the nigh-impossible process I don't see any legal reason why any amendment would not be subject to repeal from a later amendment (and if you want to get into the Supreme Court weeds, a nation that somehow has the will to erase the foundational amendments probably has a court makeup that would find a basis to allow it) and using the 18th and the 21st as examples, a repeal + gun ban combo amendment would probably look like this:


There's probably more stuff they would want to add in to make it as broad as possible but that's a good template for how it might be worded.

I had to backread because I didn't remember what your original point even was.

Because the protection for gun ownership isn't enshrined in an amendment but in the preamble itself. It's considered a natural right and exists outside of a legal documentation.


That is what establishes the right to self defense and the defense of individual liberty (natural rights). That preamble establishes the existence of the rights described in the first through tenth amendments. Those amendments don't create a right, they only define how the people perceive those rights and stipulates that the Nation must treat them. Revocation of the 2nd Amendment would not change the existence of the natural right to self defense nor would it remove the constitutions guarantee of the people to be secure in that protection.

The amendment process can not change this and instead you must write a new Constitution. A new Constitution would be the establishment of a new nation. The clock would reset and we would be at "1st National anniversary" after the ratification of whatever new Constitution was created. So in order to outlaw guns you must first destroy the old USA and create a new "Democratic People's Republic of North America". That is how cemented in these protects are. Without the original Constitution there is no rule of law and thus the Government becomes invalid and illegitimate.

It's not some accident that it's written this way. The original founders knew good and well that someday, some future government would attempt to remove the original protections of the Constitution. Having personally witnessed, first hand, the powerful political elite will go through to maintain a tyrannical oppressive government, the framers built in protections specifically against those same tactics. They predicted a political entity would attempt to confiscate guns from the citizenry, just like the British Crown did to them. They knew that same political entity would attempt to use government tools, courts and laws to lend legitimacy to it's oppression. And so they wrote the protections and counter mechanisms directly into the foundation of the entire nations legal system in such a way that their removal would constitute a violation of the rule of law.

Which goes back to the original topic. It is impossible to legally ban guns in the USA. It's a progressive fantasy they like to push as attainable. Attempting to do this at a federal level would lead to an immediate Civil War with a death toll in the millions. And since the USA is a collection of 50 smaller nations operating under a single national flag, there federal military would split itself apart with each individual going to support their home nation-states. They would take with them tanks, airplanes, naval ships, strategic assets, and an entire well armed military. Now lets look at who's the one pushing for "take all the GUNS!!!!" and who's the ones saying "from my cold dead hands". Of these two groups, which is the better armed, better trained, better disciplined and more willing to die for their beliefs. How many millions of armed, now criminalized, citizens would join the progressive "GUNS ARE BAD" Army? How many of those same citizens would join the "keep your guns" Army? It's doesn't take much thought to see how the progressives attempt would fail spectacularly and result in either their executions, imprisonment, or exile.

This isn't some fantasy here, this is the rational logical conclusions to the chain of events that would be started if the progressives were actually stupid enough to try.

The whole thing is a Catch 22.

Guns are inherent within our history, culture, and constitutional foundation. No law or level of enforcement therein could ever take guns away from US citizens; no matter how difficult or expensive the process becomes of obtaining one.

IMO we should be more focused on making sure that gun exchanges and those that receive firearms are held to a higher standard of responsibility and safety. But alas, I think there's too many guns in open circulation for even the most dramatic change of standards to make a difference. I wish there was a reasonable solution to had to diminish gun violence or violence in of itself, but it would either be ineffective, undermine our rights, or possibly both.

Obligatory.

Commit a crime with a gun, any crime. Life in Prison, no parole.
Kill someone with a gun that is not self-defense or provable accident. Death.

Gun crime drops. Dunno about Mass shootings though, since that is a whole other animal.