Gun control advocates do not realize the problem is not with Congress. Congress could ban all guns today and the Supreme Court would just go “2nd Amendment, Unconstitutional”.
So there are 2 paths here:
Get rid of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito under a Democratic President, flipping the court from 6:3 nutjobs to 5:4 rational human beings.
Repeal or alter the 2nd Amendment.
Doing that starts with 290 votes in the House, a body which can’t seem to get a simple majority on things like “Who is your leader supposed to be?” Although, they did get 311 to bounce George Santos. That’s the level of agreement they would need.
Getting 290 then flips to the Senate where you need 67 votes, in a body that struggles to get 60 votes to break a filibuster. Even removing the filibuster isn’t a guarantee because the vote is split 49 Republicans, 48 Democrats, 3 Independents. As long as Manchin (D) and Sinema (I) are still in, it’s a dead deal in the Senate.
But say you somehow got 290 and 67… Now it goes to the states for ratification and you need 38 states to sign off on it.
In 2020, Biden won 25 states + Washinton DC. Trump won 25 states. So for ratification, you would need ALL 25 Biden states + 13 Trump states.
But get this… of those 25 Biden states, only 19 of them have Democratic legislatures. In theory, Republican legislatures wouldn’t support a gun control amendment.
So now, instead of needing 13 Trump states, you may need as many as 19.
Take a look at the map… see if you can find 13 to 19 Trump states who would sign off on a gun control amendment:
But it’s not hard to recognize the immense challenges facing an outright repeal of the 2nd amendment. In fact, it’s absurd not to look at what would need to be done if only to plan a strategy.
Republicans successfully repealed RvW not in a year, not in a decade; they’ve been maneuvering the supreme court and gerrymandering and stacking courts for decades. OK, maybe not exclusively for repealing RvW, but it was a major force, and they knew it’d require stacking the supreme court with activist conservative judges. I don’t think even Reagan considered overturning election results and instituting a dictatorship when they started this; it was really about abortion, and only when Trump rolled around and conservatives looked at what they could do with what they’d achieved did they start looking beyond RvW. That was long range planning and consistent application of a plan; that’s what would be needed to repeal the 2nd.
The obstacles have been succinctly outlined; it’s idiocy to ignore the facts and believe you can change things by wishing hard enough, or by blaming the President because he hasn’t waved his all-powerful magic wand and made it happen. Idiocy, and laziness.
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