White House press secretary Sarah Sanders rebuffed a suggestion from retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens that the Second Amendment should be repealed and said the administration doesn’t believe the focus surrounding efforts to combat gun violence should be on “blocking Americans from their constitutional rights.”
“The president and the administration still fully support the Second Amendment,” Sanders told reporters during Tuesday’s White House press briefing. “We think that the focus has to remain on removing weapons from dangerous individuals, not on blocking all Americans from their constitutional rights.”
Stevens, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Gerald Ford and retired in 2010, urged gun control activists in an op-ed for the New York Times to “demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.”
The retired justice said the Second Amendment was adopted amid fears a national standing army would threaten the security of individual states, but said that “concern is a relic of the 18th century.”
A repeal of the Second Amendment, Stevens continued, would “make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.”
Though Stevens was appointed to the Supreme Court by a Republican president, he ended his tenure on the bench as the leader of the court’s liberal wing.
