—the average participant of which was a 49-year-old woman—97-year-old former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens embarrassed himself by writing a New York Times editorial in which he urged the "children" to demand outright repeal of the Second Amendment, a bitter betrayal of the spirit, if not the letter, of the oath of office from which he has never been released.

This is a lawyer we're talking about, here, who was appointed to the Court in 1975 by Jerry Ford, hardly the greatest advocate of individual liberty who ever occupied the White House. Stevens held his position for an astonishing 35 years with an unpredictable and irrational mixture of principled and unprincipled notions, among them that citizens arming themselves as a reasonable precaution against possible government overreach is an obsolete concern in the 20th and 21st centuries, despite ample evidence that World War II—a titanic struggle against perhaps the most overreaching government in history—appears to have been the big moment of his life.

Never mind that widely distributed "assault rifles" in the hands of peasants and minorities around the globe would have made genocides—and Nazism as we came to know and loathe it—impossible, and World War II unnecessary.