With the crazed assault in Las Vegas that killed over 50 and wounded hundreds as only the most recent example, America's gun violence problem has reached a breaking point, and while we can talk all we want about assault weapons bans, universal background checks, and terror watch lists, there's only one real solution to this problem: We need to repeal the Second Amendment.

This, of course, is completely unacceptable to Republicans, but that's because they don't know the real the history of the Second Amendment, and the real history of the Second Amendment is as ugly as it gets.

Thanks to corporate media's unquestioning regurgitation of right-wing talking points, most Americans think that Second Amendment is in the Constitution to protect the rights of individual gun owners from the government.

But that's not even remotely true.

The "Second Amendment" as we know it today is a legal fiction invented by the gun industry and their buddies on the Supreme Court and sold to Americans by an expensive multi-decade-long PR campaign.

Despite what you might hear on Fox So-Called news, there actually was no "individual right to own a gun" until 2008, when the Supreme Court said there was in its decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.

That decision, which struck down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban, was the culmination of a decades-long push by the gun industry to twist the Second Amendment into something that would help it sell more weapons, and it had zero basis in real Constitutional history.

Read more here.

-Thom


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