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.Much ink has been spilled arguing about this amendment in the last couple of decades. Yet the gulf between its words and the state of the law in this country has only grown.
A lot of us believed "well regulated Militia" ought to constrain the otherwise unbounded "right of the people to bear arms" — until, that is, the U.S. Supreme Court's benighted decision that essentially rendered the first phrase meaningless. Today, a private — that is, unaffiliated with any militia — right of gun ownership is regarded as inviolable, thanks to the Court and generations of reactionary paranoia that sees guns as your only real friends. "Well regulated", meanwhile, is allowed token recognition by the Court but in practical terms what we have is better called "barely regulated".
The rationale for the Second Amendment, meanwhile, has gotten lost over the centuries. As I previously wrote, any principle whose rationale we no longer understand must be revisited.
Now, you might think that the rationale hasn't been lost: I simply haven't paid attention. That's possible: I'm not a Constitutional scholar. However, if I've missed the airtight rationale, so have a lot of people. Frankly, I doubt that's the case.
A widespread assumption is that "the security of a free State" depends on "a well regulated Militia" not just to repel external threats but to thwart homegrown tyrants, too. That's a lovely theoretical idea but it's totally nonsensical in today's United States. For one thing, gun owners would have to act as a solid bloc to resist a tyrant at the federal level, and even given the ease of coordination using modern communications, it's all but impossible to imagine that hundreds of millions of gun owners could coordinate amongst themselves. Another, not entirely unrelated objection is that many if not most gun owners supported and still support the only president in our lifetimes who has come close to being a real tyrant, the orange-haired ignoramus and grifter who still refuses to accept the indisputably legitimate outcome of the 2020 election.
Given the chance to resist a genuine would-be authoritarian, guys, you backed him. So don't bleat to me that you're acting in defense of "liberty": you don't know what the word means.
The other major objection to civilian gun ownership as a bulwark against tyranny is, we have not just a standing army but significant police forces, too. Now, feel free to laugh at law enforcement for its supposed inability to suppress armed criminals, including insurrectionists. Understand, though, that when it's facing off against armed criminals, law enforcement generally seeks to preserve life. (That is, when the lives in question are white.) If police were motivated to take armed resistance seriously as insurrection, the rules of engagement would change.
If worse came to worst, it's not unimaginable that the military would be ordered to deal with armed insurrection, either. No semiautomatic rifle, even if modified to be fully automatic, would be much use against an armored vehicle.
That idea — that we civilians would be helpless against our own military — scares the hell out of us, and it should. However, we address it by insisting on a culture and a tradition within the military that it does not intervene in civilian affairs. And guess what? That culture of self-restraint has worked. That culture, not the delusional idea of a Second Amendment-fueled civilian "resistance", has kept the military subordinate to civilian authority.
So, again, why does the Second Amendment exist? What fundamental principle(s) is it intended to protect?
I'm not a gun owner but I understand the need for some to hunt game and to control wildlife that presents a danger to them. I respect the desire some have to protect themselves and their loved ones in their own homes. These would be solid bases for a Constitutional protection of gun ownership.
Is there a rational principle that justifies massive ammunition magazines or semiautomatic rifles, though? What about open-carry? Or for that matter, concealed-carry? Is there a good reason to carry a firearm for self-defense outside the home?
These and a lot of other questions are worth debating. I think I have good reasons for why most if not all should be answered in the negative but I'm willing to listen.
However, what none of us can tolerate is an unthinking, unreasonable, unbounded worship of the Second Amendment simply because it's there. It was written by men, not an infallible deity. We are free to question it — and in the wake of the intolerable bloodshed in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York and literally dozens or hundreds more smaller "mass" shootings, not to mention the incalculable number of "smaller" murder sprees and individual homicides, we goddamned well had better question it.
It's time for the great majority of us who don't regard the Second Amendment as holy writ to force the long-overdue argument about what gun ownership really should mean in this country. Then we need to set that out in plain, clear language that is more difficult for irresponsible Supreme Court Justices to distort.
It's time to retire the Second Amendment. The twisted way we've fetishized it is killing us.
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