Professor David S. Cohen urged a repeal of the Second Amendment in an essay published by Rolling Stone on June 13.

“The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact,” Cohen said. “When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized.”

A constitutional scholar, Cohen argued that the document’s framers were “wildly wrong” in, several ways, as they composed it and that only some of its flaws have been fixed.

Cohen noted that the constitution initially prohibited any amendments that would halt the slave trade in the nation’s first 20 years and counted slaves as 3/5 of a person.

“It took a bloody civil war to fix these constitutional flaws (and then another 150 years, and counting, to try to fix the societal consequences of them),” Cohen observed, adding an Equal Rights Amendment that would protect women has yet to be enacted.