Amend the Second Amendment?

About that "Militia" clause....

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the

Second Amendment… This 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 that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, December 16, 1991 (1)

In its entirety, the text of the Second Amendment reads as follows:

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

To be certain, I am not a constitutional scholar.

However, the phrasing with respect to “Militia” always has struck me as problematic.

What if the amendment were to be changed solely for the purpose of clarifying the role of the militia?

What if a five word phrase were to be inserted?

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.” (Emphasis added.)

This is not my idea.

It’s that of the late U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. (2)

Stevens wrote, in part: “Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.”

What do you think?

Sources:

(1)

(2) Stevens, John Paul. Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (at page 132). Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2014. ISBN 978-0-316-37372-2 (HC). LCCN 2014933880