This is a difficult question for many reasons. Obviously not everyone should be able to posses nuclear technology, drone controlled armies, and other advanced weapononry the future has in store for us. Pragmatic minds certainly understand the original intent of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it is why these rights are still in place and have been protected in one way or another by the Supreme Court for all these years. The question has become, though, whether or not the Second Amendment should be updated to align with the current state of the United States because of crime-riddled urban areas and high profile mass killings. Some people believe in the idea that Constitution is dynamic and should be viewed as a “Living Constitution” with evolving interpretations that are contemporaneous with modern society. The Supreme Court makes decisions based on their interpretation of the Constitution, but the Court does not amend the Constitution through their decisions. Changes to the constitution by amendment are proposed either by Congress through a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the State legislatures. From 1789 to January 3, 2017, there have 11,699 proposed amendments, but only 27 of those propositions have actually led to amendments, and 10 of those came with the Bill of Rights. An example of a proposed amendment is Senator Barbara Boxer’s proposal on November 15, 2016, to abolish the Electoral College and instead use the results of a direct popular election to decide the President of the United States. The proposal has gone nowhere like some many proposed amendments before it.

The last amendment to be ratified was the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, and it was submitted by Congress to the states for ratification in 1789, but it did not initially pass through. In 1992, nearly 203 years later, it finally became Constitutional law, prohibiting Congress from passing any legislation that would increase or decrease their current salary.

The process to amendment is difficult, and because of crippling political partisanship that is wrapped in party loyalty and polarized on a daily basis, any change to the Second Amendment will certainly have to develop when one party owns two-thirds of the votes in Congress. The question by many today is whether the Second Amendment should be amended to deal with current issues of gun violence in the United States. Because the militia and gun ownership are bound by one amendment, the notion is complex. In essence, militias are designed to protect Constitutional rights whether from the tyranny of the Federal Government or the invasion of a foreign entity, which makes it hard to say that militias are irrelevant in America’s current age, or any age. Additionally, in order to have an effective militia, either organized or unorganized, firearms are required– but should everyone have the right to gun ownership or only militia members? To curb violence in America, gun restrictions could hypothetically provide some relief, but overturning the Second Amendment and taking guns from the public puts the entirety of the Constitution in danger for the reasons discussed.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Federal Government in its current state does not provide a bi-partisan think tank capable of working together to solve the issues surrounding the country’s violent culture, which is a complicated issue that is a tangle of matters that includes mental instability, poor education, oppression, varying ideologies, anti-nationalism, and the easy accessibility of guns on the black market.

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