From a couple days ago:
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It’s understandable that Justice John Paul Stevens would call for repeal of the Second Amendment, as he did Tuesday in an op-ed article in the New York Times, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of it to protect some gun sales.
I have great respect for Justice Stevens, and what’s more I agree with him that the Heller case was wrongly decided by the court in 2008. But it would actually be a terrible idea to attempt a repeal of the Second Amendment just because the Supreme Court got it wrong. Experience shows that the Constitution is weakened if we respond to bad Supreme Court precedent by trying to amend it right away.
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The most recent, telling example is the case of Texas v. Johnson. In that 1989 decision, the justices found a First Amendment right to burn the U.S. flag as a matter of symbolic free expression. In response, a serious national movement emerged to amend the First Amendment to exclude the flag from free-speech protection.
In principle, the proposed flag-burning amendment made a certain amount of sense. The flag is a special symbolic aspect of our public life. Men and women of the military really do fight and die for it. The proposed amendment would not have been a major reduction in freedom of expression; it would have been restricted to the flag itself. It would have been plausible to pass it.
Yet the flag-burning amendment was a very bad idea — not because of its content but because what it would have meant to pass it. The First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, has been around since 1791 without alteration. That very antiquity strengthens its protections — all of them. Opening the Pandora’s box of changing our fundamental rights because of a Supreme Court decision we don’t like threatens the very structure of the Bill of Rights itself.
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If you believe that the Supreme Court has the legitimate authority to find the constitutional rights to abortion, gay marriage and freedom to burn the flag, then you had better acknowledge that the court also has the legitimacy to expand the Second Amendment — even if you disagree with that judgment.
To be sure, it’s logically possible to think that the justices have the authority to decide the Heller case, which overturned restrictions on handguns in the District of Columbia, but that their judgement should be overturned by an amendment. But logic alone misses the reality that calling for the amendment of the Constitution in response to judicial overreach weakens judicial legitimacy itself.
I'm guessing Joe Six-Pack thought that Flag Burning Amendment was a fine thing.