In 2014, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an interesting and concise little book called Six Amendments, which contained his prescriptions for fixing the infrastructure of the Constitution. Chapter Six dealt with the Second Amendment, which now reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Stevens proposed to add a phrase to clarify what is admittedly confusing about the first two clauses of the amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the militia, shall not be infringed."

This seemed to me to be both sensible and impossible to achieve, as are so many things in our politics these days. In Tuesday’s New York Times, however, Stevens went even further than he did in his book.

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters. That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That is shooting the moon, right there. I hate to disagree with Justice Stevens, but if he thinks it’s going to be “simple” to blue-pencil the Second Amendment, he’s been away from the carnival far too long. Right now, we already are too close to every conservative’s dream-shot of an Article V Convention of the States.

I, for one, don’t want to exchange the work of James Madison and George Mason for that of Mark Levin and Tom Coburn. Given the corrupt state of our politics, and they are corrupted in every conceivable way, I think it’s best that we give the Constitution a good leaving alone for a while.

Scalia and Stevens, on the Court Getty Images

Besides, in the book he published two years ago, Stevens pointed the way to a more judicious—and, frankly, more deliciously ironic—solution when he pointed out that, in the Heller decision, the late Antonin Scalia left open a loophole on gun control that’s just sitting there waiting for the right kind of judges to come waltzing through. In his book, Stevens writes:

“…Justice Scalia went out of his way to limit the Court’s holding not only to a subset of weapons that might be used for self-protection, but also to a subset of conduct that is protected. The specific holding of the case only covers the possession of handguns in the home for the purposes of self-defense, while a later part of the opinion adds emphasis to the narrowness of that holding by describing uses that were not protected by common law or state practice. Prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons, or on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, and laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings or imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms are specifically identified as permissible regulations.”

And then, the kicker:

“Thus, Congress’s failure to enact laws that would expand the use of background checks and limit the availability of automatic weapons cannot be justified by reference to the Second Amendment or to anything the Supreme Court has said about that amendment.”

And there you have it. To get the laws you want, elect a better Congress. Elect better governors and state legislators. Elect better people to advise and consent on judges who will read what Scalia wrote and put it into practice. That’s the whole thing. You want policy change? Elect better people.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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