There's still freedom of speech in countries with stricter gun laws. Also in my country prostitution and abortions are legal. So stricter gun laws don't always lead to other restrictions.

The difference is the 2nd Amendment is not a law, it's in the Constitution. The Constitution ain't worth nothing if it is not respected.

I don't care about gun rights. I do care about the Constitution, and I very much care about the First Amendment.

The Constitution is not set in stone - it can be amended. If the Constitution is amended in a legal way then how is it disrespectful?

So long as it’s respected until/unless amended, I’m entirely in agreement.

Yup - passing laws that straight up ignore the Constitution would set a really bad precedent.

That's what I'm getting at. If we take the Constitution seriously, but want to enact real gun law reform, amending the Constitution is the solution.

Repealing am amendment isn't ignoring it. It's the opposite.

You could clarify that you mean the rights stated in the amendments of course.

The while we're at it, let's get rid of the rest of the Bill of Rights, is terrifying.

There are countries freer than the USA where the government reserves the right to severely restrict speech and even criminalize some forms of political speech, if it serves the public interest. If you express Nazi views in Germany, for instance, you go to jail. Guess what -- Germany hasn't had to deal with a Nazi problem significant enough to turn into a real political movement in nearly 80 years. The USA, by contrast, had a near miss with Hitler 2 actually occupying the White House.

Sorry, but the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go. It should be replaced with a formulation of freedom expression that better balances individual freedom with the public interest according to modern political standards.

In fact, given the problems with corruption in the American system and first-past-the-post voting leading to money-driven, rather than truly democratic, politics, the entire constitution probably needs to be rethought. No less of an American political thinker than Justice Ginsburg has opined that the US constitution is no longer, in the current era, a model for good governance. This should happen in a civilized fashion with a convention and ratification much like the current constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, but it nonetheless needs to happen.

> There are countries freer than the USA where the government reserves the right to severely restrict speech and even criminalize some forms of political speech

No, there aren't.

> the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go

That's the first thing the Nazis did, as well as Mussolini, and every other repressive government. Without free speech, the rest of your rights go down the drain.

If Ginsburg advocated getting rid of free speech, I'd like to see a cite from you about that.

When Ginsburg was interviewed on Al-Hayat TV in 2012 about where the new Egyptian government should look for inspiration, she cited the South African constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Council on Human Rights positively and said "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution" as a model for establishing a new state:

https://africasacountry.com/2012/02/ruthbaderginsburg/

On the matter of free speech, note that the South African and Canadian constitutions, and the ECHR, all protect freedom of expression exclude hate speech as protected speech. It is VERY much in line with modern statecraft to do so, and the doctrinaire approach of the First Amendment (only established in 1969, by the way, before which the USA implemented speech restrictions not dissimilar from those seen elsewhere) is the outlier here. Also note that getting rid of the First Amendment is not getting rid of freedom of expression.

Granted, her position was not even as radical as mine, which is that we must rethink the constitution from the ground up and implement a new form of government more resistant to corruption, again drawing from examples of more modern statecraft -- a multiparty parliamentary system, for instance. All she was saying was that new governments should look elsewhere for a template.

Ginsburg's views that the U.S. constitution is the supreme law of the land, and must be hewed closely to and not played fast and loose with for as long as it is active, were congruent with mine.