If gun control advocates thought they were making headway in the wake of February's Florida high school shooting, their cause may have been slowed last week when a former liberal U.S. Supreme Court justice said the country ought to repeal the Second Amendment.
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens, 97, said in an essay on The New York Times website that getting rid of that pesky part of the Constitution would render moot the high court's 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision on which he was on the losing end.
The Heller decision affirmed that the Second Amendment's clause about "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" essentially included an individual's right to have a gun for self-defense.
Not surprisingly, Democrats didn't knock themselves out defending Stevens. That argument, after all, will not fly in most states other than on both coasts.
Indeed, one senator, who is vulnerable in November's election, quickly declared his opposition to the former's justice's argument.
"I strongly support the Second Amendment," Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., told the Washington Examiner, "and disagree with Justice Stevens that it should be repealed."
Unlike most Democrats who might voice the words but not mean them, the Indiana senator signed two amicus briefs in support of the individual's rights to keep and bear arms both in the Heller case and in another case, McDonald v. Chicago.
Make no mistake, though. The left understands the risks.
The Washington Post editorial board, for instance, sought to assure voters in the 2016 presidential election that "Hillary Clinton doesn't want to 'abolish' the Second Amendment," and even organizers for the recent March for Our Lives said that "we support the Second Amendment."
But do they mean it?
A February Economist/YouGov poll said 39 percent of Democrats support repeal of the amendment.
Forget tinkering around the margins - closing loopholes, registering gun owners, getting rid of bump stocks, raising ages of ownership.
No, said Stevens, a 1975 appointee of Republican President Gerald Ford who took little time in establishing he was anything but conservative, getting rid of the amendment is the only way.
"It would eliminate the only legal rule (Heller) that protects sellers of firearms in the United States," he wrote.
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, had the very same idea for our country early last month.
"No one dares apply the clear solution to the promotion of guns and homicide in America," the leader of the terrorist exporting country tweeted. "What's the solution? It's to make guns illegal."
Stevens, who served on the high court for 35 years, can have no illusions about suggesting the repeal of a constitutional amendment, a suggestion he also made two years after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. The repeal first must earn the approval of a two-thirds majority of members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate (or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures).
For the record, neither party has had a two-thirds majority in the House since 1979 and in the Senate since 1965.
If the repeal somehow made it through Congress, it would need to be approved by three-fourths of the states.
Since the Bill of Rights - foundational building blocks of our liberty - was ratified in 1791, only 17 amendments have been added to the Constitution. And only one, the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol, has been repealed.
So one might wonder whether Stevens was pandering to the recent protests over the school shooting, as so many have done, or is still sore about being on the losing end of Heller, or both.
In his New York Times essay, again like so many others seeking gun control, he raised the National Rifle Association as the bogeyman.
That 5-4 decision, Stevens wrote, "has provided the NRA with a propaganda weapon of immense power."
"Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment," he said, "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."
That argument, as usual, omits the obvious.
Stevens doesn't say what might happen to the 300 million guns now in Americans' possession. But if there is no Second Amendment (a "relic of the 18th Century," he calls it), they'll have to be removed, leaving our only loving protectorate as the federal government.
We will be interested to hear the vociferous gun control supporters - in and out of Congress - weigh in on the former justice's words. We don't believe it's a winning strategy for them in the fall elections specifically and in our current civil discourse generally.