Former Supreme Court Judge Says It's Time to Repeal the Second Amendment

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens believes that the Second Amendment should be repealed.

Stevens—who served on the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010—voiced his opinion on Tuesday through a New York Times op-ed labeling the right to bear arms “a relic of the 18th century.” He added that revoking the Second Amendment “would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

On March 23, hundreds of thousands of people gathered across the U.S. and the world for March for Our Lives to rally in support of gun control reform. Some of those reforms, as Stevens put it, include “enact[ing] legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms.”

But the 97-year-old also pointed that the march’s leaders should do more than just demonstrate, but should “demand” that the amendment be repealed, asserting that it “would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform.”

The marches were a direct response to the mass shooting of 17 people on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.