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The Second Amendment is not being thrown out; assault weapons should simply be detached from its protection.  As for criminalization, I believe we also criminalize possession of radiocative materials, so that they cannot be weaponized.  Should the Second Amendment protect people who want to build atomic bombs in their cellars?  The Second protects the right to bear arms; it does not define what those arms are.  Assault weapons are also weapons of personal mass destruction:  if we can remove atomic material, and other heinous items from the definition of a constitutionally protected weapon, why can't assault weapons be removed as well? 

   The Fifth Amendment does not define what can be criminalized, or what penalties can be attached to such criminalization; nor does it mandate clemency.  I, perhaps, overreached by suggesting that appeal processes should be removed.  The Sixth Amendment guarantees certainl trial procedures as rights of the accused; however, it is also silent regarding clemency and judicial appeal.  One cannot remove from any of the three Amendments what they do not already contain.

    Your comparison to China or Russia is an overstatement, but seems---at least in my experience---to be the standard fall-back argument of those interpreters of the Second Amendment who believe that anything they want to weaponize is automatically protected.  They also prefaced the amendment with the phrase, well regulated militia:  this presumes that the right to bear arms devolves only upon a militia which, by its very inclusion in the language of the amendment, is defined as well-regulated.  The many extremists who possess weapons of all sorts, and vociferously claim protection from the Second, cannot be considered "well" regulated; or even regulated in the least degree.  A good example of that lack of regulation would be the assortment of fanatics, thugs, attention seekers, and narcissitic states-rightsers who gathered at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and attempted to disrupt a Constitutional Process while defacing and damaging property that did not belong to them individually, and, most heinously, causinng loss of life and personal injury.  They probably believed they constitued a militia---the "Trumpeters," perhaps.  That militia could not be said to be well regulated, or even regulated in any way.  That even one of those people might possess an assault weapon should be, and remain, the stuff of constant nightmares until every last assault weapon is either rounded up and placed in the hands of trained, and sworn, professionals (military or police), or destroyed and melted down into slag.  

     The argument that guns do not kill people, people kill people is disingenuous.  I agree:  guns to not kill people; just as hammers, frying pans, buckets of latex paint, and ballpoint pens do not kill people.  One could argue that booze does not cause traffic fatalities; but booze, ingested, enables such fatalities.  LSD, in a testube in a lab, does not destroy a brainl but, ingested, it enables that destruction.  Assault weapons enable the convenient and relatively easy destruction of human life (just as "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" enabled a destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was more convenient and cost effective than repeated conventional bombings would have been).  An assault weapon is more convenient to and efficient in the destruction of human life, in the same way that the guillotine was more convenient to and efficient in the execution of human beings than either a headsman or a gallows and a rope had been.  

     We cannot regulate moral evil; it exists among us---in the form of a failed lawyer in Siberia, a mediocre housepainter in Bavaria, or a dapper speculator who amasses a huge empire of hotels and golf courses.  But we can regulate those tools that enable the multiple extinctions of human life, especially human life in the stage of childhood.  Yes, someone may stil attempt to weaponize a hammer, frying ban, bucket of paint and a ballpoint pen; but the likelihood of these enabling multiple murders is miniscule.

      For my undergrad experience, my parents comeplled me to attend a party-school that concealed its excesses beneath the more respectable guise of a church-associated school.  Yes, students became drunk---every weekend.  But, year after year, expensive damage was inflicted more by drunken fraternity parties than by individual alcoholics.  Because of their numerous members, the fraternities' inebriation became, in a sense, a weaponization.  Injury---to human beings and to property---resulted routinely, and were quietly concealed by a complicit administration.  But, in 1988, that weaponized mass inebriation resulted in a death; and the person who died was the god-daughter of the presiding bishop of the denomination that controlled the college.  This led to a radical readjustment of procedures and permissions:  the number of fraternities and sororities was severly curtailed (cut by half); their ability to promote and encourage "party drinking" was restricted; and severe penalties, up to and including not only expulsion but prosecution under existing local law, was activated.  To this day, the college is now the kind of institution for which so many of us had wished in the seventies.

     Assault weapons must be so treated . . . immediately, totally, without exception, and with all of the force that legitimate government authority can muster.  It is time we respect the entire Second Amendment, by enforcing the description of well regulated upon the militia which, through the individuals of which it consists, murders children during school shootings, or threatens life and property during moments of insurrection . . . like January 6th, 2021.

Starward