Last week, a school shooting in Bend, Oregon resulted in the death of three children and a teacher. Just a decade ago, a school shooting like this would have been a months-long news story that put gun control at the forefront of the political debate. To this day, we all remember hearing about Sandy Hook and Parkland. Today, a school shooting is unlikely to be anything more than a one-day story. Go to any news site and look through today’s headlines. Do you see anything about the Bend shooting, which less than a decade ago would have shocked the very conscience of our nation? Almost certainly not. By now, it’s old news.
Why is that? How can we, as a society, move past such a devastating tragedy so quickly and callously? The answer is even more disturbing than the question: What once was so rare as to necessitate months of wall-to-wall coverage is simply the norm in modern America. Last week’s tragedy was the 52nd school shooting of 2026. That means, on average, there has been a school shooting once every five days this year.
Nor is the senseless violence limited to schools. In 2025, there were 42,348 gun deaths in the United States. Every day, 130 more people will be added to that grave statistic. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens, above cancer and motor vehicle accidents. Every month, more than 70 women are shot by a partner during a domestic violence incident. Every year, more than three million children witness gun violence. 59% of American adults know someone who has experienced gun violence.
This is not normal. The U.S. gun homicide rate is a staggering 26 times higher than that of other developed countries. No other developed country has such a high shooting rate. While the U.S. has had 52 school shootings and counting, Europe—an entire continent, with twice the population as the United States and varying gun laws across multiple countries—has had just six. Canada has had just two. In the few countries with gun death rates on par with the U.S., the devastation is driven primarily by civil war, cartel activity, or gang violence, not civilian gun ownership.
Why do we as a society accept this? The truth is, we don’t. More than 60% of Americans support stricter gun laws. 80% of voters support safe storage laws. 69% of voters want to hold the gun industry to the same standard as tobacco and opioid companies. 73% of voters support a law to hold parents responsible for shootings committed by their children using the parents’ gun. A majority of voters support banning assault weapons.
So, if simple gun control measures are so overwhelmingly popular with the electorate, why doesn’t Congress or the many state legislatures just pass them? Democrats and gun control activists will point to the gun lobby. This is a smart electoral strategy. The gun lobby is a formidable enemy. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has almost $200 million in annual revenue and spends tens of millions on campaign expenditures and lobbying, peaking at $54 million in the 2016 election. This pales in comparison to what gun manufacturers themselves will spend on elections, which tops $180 million. Unsurprisingly, 98% of pro-gun election spending favors the Republican Party. With such an enormous war chest and well-coordinated political machine so openly opposed to even the most basic gun legislation, it’s no wonder that people always point the finger at the gun lobby when they try to explain our country’s gun violence epidemic.
Yet as formidable as the gun lobby appears, they can be beaten. Most blue states have strict gun laws, including an assault weapons ban. At the federal level, the Biden administration was able to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which strengthened background checks, cracked down on straw purchases, and provided funding for local law enforcement to handle gun-related enforcement. Under the Clinton administration, Congress passed a 10-year nationwide ban on assault weapons and passed the Brady bill, which established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Even red states have passed modest gun control measures, such as safe storage requirements and red flag laws. All of these passed despite the best efforts of the gun lobby.
So if the gun lobby isn’t responsible for the utter failure of our country to protect its citizens, who is? The Supreme Court. It started in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, where the Court struck down a citywide ban on owning handguns, even inside of private homes. In the years following Heller, the Justices were relatively quiet on the Second Amendment issue, striking down only a few laws, mostly similar to the one at issue in Heller. That all changed in 2022. In the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down “may-issue” gun laws, which gave police discretion to reject applications for licenses to carry, and instead required states to adopt “shall-issue” laws, where almost anyone could get a gun after clearing only a few basic hurdles. Additionally, the Bruen court required any gun laws to be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This effectively froze the state of our gun laws in 1792, stymieing the attempts of Congress and state legislatures to deal with deadly weapons unimaginable to the musket-wielding colonists of Lexington and Concord. Bruen wreaked havoc upon our remaining gun laws. In the past few years, the Court has struck down laws prohibiting bringing guns on private property without the owner’s consent, a ban on bump stocks, and even a law banning ownership of firearms from illegal drug users. One Justice even issued a dissenting opinion arguing that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders are entitled to gun ownership under the Second Amendment. This term, the Justices have agreed to hear a case about whether or not states can ban deadly assault weapons, which were illegal nationwide just a few decades ago. The situation is even worse in the lower courts, which are split over whether it’s constitutional to disarm all felons or just those convicted of violent crimes.
Here’s the thing gun control advocates won’t tell you about these seemingly absurd court decisions: they’re not wrong. The Second Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” It gives that right to the people, not to all people except criminals and drug users and people with mental health issues and those the police simply don’t believe need a firearm. Nor does it limit what qualifies as “arms” to weapons available in the 18th century. This makes it practically impossible to enact meaningful gun reform. Gun control activists therefore have a choice: continue pushing slight variations of the same legislation, hoping that one day, a future court might change course, overturn two decades of precedent dating back to Heller, and choose not to strike it down; or, alternatively, acknowledge that working within the current framework of the Second Amendment is impossible, and turn their efforts to repealing it.
Like all rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the right to bear arms was codified following British abuses of power in the lead-up to the Revolution. The British originally marched on Lexington and Concord to seize colonists’ stockpiles of gunpowder and ammunition. Instead, the colonists used that very same pile to fight back, kicking off the fight for America’s independence. Even after winning our nation’s freedom, the early American military was unable to quickly respond to events like Shays’ Rebellion, relying on local militias to keep order and provide for the national defense.
The conditions that led the framers to codify the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights simply no longer exist. America is no longer a nation of farmers and frontiersmen, living in perpetual fear of the next Indian raid or slave revolt. Thankfully, we abolished slavery and have decent relations with modern Native American tribes. Nor is our national defense completely reliant on militias of private citizens to hold off invaders for days until the actual military arrives. The 82nd Airborne Division can have boots on the ground anywhere in the world in four to six hours. Speaking of our incredibly strong military, the most important reason why the founders created the Second Amendment is also no longer viable. The framers created the Second Amendment so that the people could overthrow a future tyrannical government. During the American Revolution, the Revolutionaries used muskets and cannons to fight off the world’s leading superpower … which was also fighting with muskets and cannons. In the modern era, there is no number of average citizens with rifles that can hope to even come close to the strength of a government backed by predator drones, F22 fighter jets, and ballistic missiles. Most people point to the need to defend themselves as a justification for the Second Amendment. Most of the time, however, when someone needs to defend themselves, it is from someone with a gun of their own, a problem that could be solved with the strict gun control measures common in European democracies and impossible in a country stymied by Second Amendment restrictions.
Of course, the Second Amendment is part of the Constitution, which means that repealing it will be really, really, really hard. But really hard is not impossible. In fact, it’s been done before. The framers knew that they weren’t infallible; that’s why they added an amendment process. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress, as well as ratification by three-fourths of the states (currently, this means 38 states). This process has been used to codify cataclysmic changes to our system of government, from the end of slavery to women’s suffrage, from electing senators and the vice president to the creation of the federal income tax, not to mention the Bill of Rights itself. Yet among those prodigious changes to our constitutional order are two amendments most people have never heard of: the 18th and 21st Amendments. It makes sense that almost nobody knows what these amendments do; they have no meaningful effects today. The 18th Amendment banned the sale of alcohol in the United States, ushering in the era of prohibition. The 21st Amendment simply reads “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” Once the people realized that prohibition was a mistake, they repealed the 18th Amendment, legalizing alcohol nationwide and placing its regulation in the hands of local governments.
I want to make it clear that my call to repeal the Second Amendment is not a call to ban all guns outright. Guns are a tool that serve a purpose in our society and should be available to those able to wield them responsibly, whether it’s for hunting, self-defense, or just some fun at a shooting range. But gun ownership, like a driver’s license, should be a privilege available only to the responsible few, not to the impetuous many. Of course, the Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, and has been around for far longer than the 18th ever was. Yet that makes no difference. The process for repealing it is the same, and it is a process that we as a country need to undergo. Repealing an amendment so deeply ingrained into American culture will not be easy. But when the alternative is continuing to sacrifice our children in the name of an amendment that serves no purpose except as a relic of a bygone era, what choice do we have?
