Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says it's time to repeal the Second Amendment.
The Chicago-born Northwestern grad, 97, wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times Tuesday that the constitutional right to bear arms is "a relic of the 18th century."
He urged schoolchildren and their supporters who are demanding a ban on semi-automatic weapons, more comprehensive background checks on firearm purchasers and increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 to "seek a more effective and more lasting reform."
"They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment," he wrote, arguing that the amendment was designed to counter the threat a national standing army was once thought to pose to free states _ a concern he said no longer applies.
The provocative column, even from a retired, liberal justice is likely to make waves. No candidate for the court who expressed such a view would currently have a chance of being confirmed by the Senate.
But Stevens, who retired in 2010 as the longest-serving justice in U.S. history, wrote that the court's 2008 ruling that there is an individual right to bear arms overturned 200 years of legal history during which the Second Amendment "was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation."
He approvingly quoted former Chief Justice Warren Burger describing the National Rifle Association's ultimately successful attack on that understanding as "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."
The NRA did not immediately respond.
Stevens was born and raised in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood (his family owned a department store) and is one of a handful of living Chicagoans to have been at Wrigley Field for the 1932 World Series game at which Babe Ruth famously called his shot, pointing to the centerfield scoreboard before hitting a home run.
