We limit and effectively violate amendments all the time. Why not the 2nd?

[Brian Howell]

For many Americans, the Right to Bear Arms is sacrosanct. Or so would the NRA and much of the right wing have you believe. But why are congressional, executive, and now even judicial constraints on the 2nd Amendment considered to be un-American and illegitimate when such on our other amendments are not?

Take, for example, our freedom of speech. It is one of the most clearly stated and robustly protected rights in the Constitution, yet it is also subject to numerous restrictions. Our speech might not be protected if it falsely damages someone’s reputation, aids and abets a crime, contains a threat of violence, reveals a trade or military secret, harasses, plagiarizes, inflicts severe emotional distress, is deemed to be obscene, incites violence, or leaks classified information, to name a few. The United States Supreme Court further allows restrictions on when, where, and how we can express ourselves even when the message itself is protected. In some cases we control who may speak, such as limitations we may constitutionally impose on the speech of students, prisoners, and government employees.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/12/second_amendment_allows_for_gun_control.html

And while we're at it, let's consider what the amendment says and how the courts interpreted it up until a couple of decades ago.

So clearly and unequivocally held was this worldview that no less a liberal squish than Richard Nixon Supreme Court appointee Warren Burger said after his retirement in 1991 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.”

This reading was based on precedent. The Supreme Court had clearly agreed with Burger’s interpretation and not that of the special interest groups he chastised, perhaps most famously in a 1939 case called U.S. v. Miller. That ruling said that since the possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” had no reasonable relationship to the “preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” the court simply could not find that the Second Amendment guaranteed “the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” Period, full stop. And that was the viewpoint adopted by the courts for years.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/06/how_the_nra_perverted_the_meaning_of_the_2nd_amendment.html

[jack saunders]

I agree with all your points, Brian.  So how do we account for the unreasoning ferocity RE guns? 

I posit that approximately 10 pct of your fellow man (and almost no women) deeply distrust human kind...as you might distrust a wild animal.  To these people, the probability is high they will one day, and soon, be forced to kill someone to preserve their place on the rock. So naturally, as they see it, the wise founders, uncorrupted by latter-day political correctness, wrote that sovereign king-of-the-castle version of the 2nd amendment into Eternal Law, right up there with the 10 Commandments.  

So your mission, Mr. Obama, is to now trim it back.  This 10 pct cares alot more about the freedom to shoot an intruder than it cares about the freedom to defend a thesis in the public square.  Yet regulation is now inevitable.  

There will be blood.  The mad man in London last week is typical of the victims of modernization.

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