“What was your scariest day in school?” asked my husband on our way home from the ginormous, inspirational Portsmouth March for Our Lives rally March 24. Our collective “scariest” recollections were pitiful compared to what kids face today.

How did we get here? When did the Second Amendment become a license allowing grenade launchers and other military people-killers in the home? Sawed-off shotguns were outlawed in 1939 by a unanimous Supreme Court, stating they had no “reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia”; therefore, the justices could not “say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.”

In 1991, retired Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, who served 17 years on the court, was surely referring to the National Rifle Association in an interview on PBS. He said that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups.”

In recent news, another long-serving and much-admired retired Republican Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, makes a powerful argument for repealing the Second Amendment.

So here’s my “to-do” list: a) Follow the kids and Fight for Their Lives; b) Repeal and rewrite a Second Amendment giving reasonable hunting and self-defending gun rights while acknowledging that we have had a “militia” for a very long time and they have the military weapons that they need but we don’t; c) Repeal and recover from Citizens United by adopting the proposed 28th Amendment; and d) Ask everyone I know to spend a moment recalling their scariest school day.

Carol Selsberg

Eliot

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