It is time to get rid of the Second Amendment.

As some of our leaders and courts misuse that amendment today, it does our country far more harm than good. We’d be better off without it.

Let’s start with this: In just one week last month, we had four more mass murders in the U.S. involving guns:

On Feb. 20, an Uber driver in Kalamazoo, Michigan, apparently shooting at random, killed six people and wounded two others. On Feb. 23, a man in Phoenix shot to death his parents and two sisters, before being killed by police. On Feb. 25, a Kansas man, under court order to stay away from a woman he’d abused, killed three people and wounded 14 others in a shooting spree at a lawnmower factory. On Feb. 26, a man in Belfair, Washington, shot to death his wife, two children and one other person before shooting himself in front of deputies.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

This is all too common. On Tuesday, police in Kansas City were searching for a man who used an AK-47 to kill four neighbors overnight, and is suspected of shooting a fifth person. And in Jacksonville, Florida, only a jammed gun allowed 11 people in a store to flee from a would-be mass shooter. He wounded one person before killing himself.

These victims are among more than 2,300 people shot to death in the United States so far this year.

More than 304,000 other Americans — mothers, fathers, boys, girls — were killed by guns from 2005 to 2015.

That’s more than a hundred 9/11s, just to put things in perspective.

You might argue that even this high price is worth paying, because guns guarantee our freedom. But do they?

Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. He didn’t say anything about spilling the blood of innocent children, the blood of people just working at their job, the blood of women meeting at a restaurant.

As Americans, we celebrate the Bill of Rights as a fundamental cornerstone of human rights and democracy. Our rights of free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, the right against self-incrimination, freedom of religion and other rights are as vibrant and necessary today as they were 230 years ago. Those rights have been a model for other democracies around the world.

But a lot has changed since 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified. The founding fathers talked about all men being created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, even as they signed a document affirming slavery and counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and legislative representation.

Most of us (except, apparently, 20 percent of Trump supporters) reject slavery. We agree that all of us, not just white male landowners, are entitled to vote and to enjoy equal rights.

So let’s consider the full text of the Second Amendment: “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.”

‘One Of The Greatest Pieces Of Fraud’

If you visit the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, in Fairfax, Virginia, you’ll find only the second part of that sentence — the part after the first comma — tacked up on the lobby wall in shining gold letters.

Why does the NRA censor that inconvenient opening dependent clause? Because the NRA’s leaders have worked remorselessly for the past 50 years to create and sustain the fiction that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. In “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, details the dubious scholarship and rewriting of history behind that campaign, and behind the idea that we must all be armed to protect our liberties against the state.

In 1991, former Chief Justice Warren Burger, on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, discussing the NRA’s campaign, said 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.”

A lot has changed since 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified.

Yes, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion for a 5-4 court recognizing an individual right to bear arms. But to do so, he and the court’s conservative wing ignored the historical record and legal precedent — including four previous Supreme Court rulings.

The idea that we must be armed to protect our rights from our own government is the exact opposite of what the men who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed, according to their own writings.

“There’s simply no evidence of it (the Second Amendment) being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias,” said Waldman in a 2014 interview.

“To the framers, that phrase, ‘a well-regulated militia,’ was really critical,” he said. “It was an individual right to fulfill the duty to serve in the militias.”

‘A Well-Regulated Militia’

So important was this idea that the first version of the amendment included an exception, stating, “no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

At the time that James Madison drafted the Second Amendment, the United States didn’t have a standing army. The Continental Army had been disbanded in 1783, after the end of the Revolutionary War. The U.S. relied on well-regulated state militias to protect the state – the country – from external threats.

Obviously, that is no longer the case. It hasn’t been the case for over 200 years. We don’t need a right to bear arms to protect us from external threats. We have the world’s most powerful military to do that.

As for the idea that our founders wanted us to have guns to protect ourselves from our own government, not only is that false history, it’s deeply foolish.

Many extreme U.S. gun advocates have been convinced from day one of his administration that President Barack Obama was going to seize everyone’s guns, declare martial law, bring in the black helicopters, and turn our government over to the U.N.

We don’t need a right to bear arms to protect us from external threats. We have the world’s most powerful military to do that.

Remember the lunatic Jade Helm conspiracy-mongering last year, when Texas ranchers and even Gov. Greg Abbott were agog over Internet rumors that U.S. military exercises were really an insidious plot to take over the state?

Here’s the thing: Had there really been such a conspiracy, would a bunch of cowboys with handguns, shotguns and assault rifles be any match for the might of the U.S. military? Doesn’t that just seem a bit unlikely?

Both U.S. history and world history reflect a consistent pattern: Armed uprisings lead to brutal repression or horrendous civil wars. The few uprisings that succeed do so not because of an armed citizenry, but because of massive foreign military assistance – and, even at that, foreign intervention usually turns out badly.

Real change, time and again, has come from peaceful protests. Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement knew that. Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained independence for India from the British. In the past three decades, nonviolent movements have ousted corrupt governments in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, South Africa, Paraguay, Georgia and (albeit temporarily) Ukraine.

In most of these countries, nonviolent protesters were murdered. But by not taking up arms, their movements won their causes while avoiding far greater bloodshed. Those peaceful protesters demonstrated a bravery that stands in stark contrast to the gun-waving bravado of the recent Malheur occupation in Oregon by a self-described militia group.

An Anachronism

If we don’t need guns to protect ourselves from external threats or from our own government, then what purpose does the Second Amendment serve? I’d say none.

We don’t need it anymore. To be sure, it likely isn’t going away soon, since amending the Constitution would require the support of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate.

In any event, getting rid of it – or, at the very least, restoring our understanding of the Second Amendment’s original meaning – wouldn’t mean getting rid of all guns.

It would just mean that we could treat guns as we do any other dangerous object. We could more easily require people to be trained in how to use them properly. We could register them and keep them out of the hands of those who, due to mental illness, criminal convictions or court orders, shouldn’t have them.

Discussing what the Second Amendment really means — and whether, today, it is an unnecessary anachronism — should be the start of a sane conversation about firearms and how, as a country, we can properly reduce the carnage that we suffer from guns on a daily basis.