Vanity Fair: Second Amendment 'Must Be Removed from the Constitution'

On January 2, Vanity Fair ran an all-out attack on the constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and common sense in a column by Kurt Eichenwald titled, "Let's Repeal the Second Amendment."

Eichenwald's approach consists of attacking the NRA, arguing that gun owners avoid discussing more gun control by saying they don't want to "politicize" shootings, and taking the standard progressive position that there wasn't really a right to keep and bear arms until Justice Antonin Scalia created one in recent Supreme Court decisions.

One of his criticisms of the NRA is that they opposed forcing "states to submit mental-health records to FBI databases" following the Virginia Tech shooting. While this seems to have little, if anything, to do with the 2nd Amendment, Eichenwald said the submission of such records was "reasonable" and berated the NRA for pressing legislators to soften the requirement.

Missing here is the fact that the NRA was not trying to find ways to put guns in the hands of the mentally ill -- as Eichenwald intimates they were -- rather, they were trying to be sure the government didn't get a new tool whereby they could flag a patient's record for reasons other than mental health, thereby denying him or her the right to keep and bear arms for life.