After Sandy Hook; after thousands of firearm massacres that followed; after the latest bloodletting in Uvalde, Texas where nineteen children and two teachers were slain, I think a serious conversation about firearm proliferation and the moral legacy of the Second Amendment is long overdue.
As predictable as clockwork, the noise heard from gun rights advocates after yet another shooting massacre, grinds on about the right to bear arms assured by the Bill of Rights’ Second Amendment.
The prevailing assumption that guides their argument is some vaguely perceived notion about enabling civilians to take up arms against a tyrannical government. That sentiment rides in tandem with a paranoia in the imaginations of Americans who fancy themselves important enough of a threat to the established order.
What actually makes sense is how they’ve leveraged the Second Amendment as a response to noticeably diminished privilege over the last thirty years. They’ve cos-played Second Amendment “solutions” in response to an undesirable cultural order (illegal immigration, gay marriage, trans rights). Rather than relying solely on the effort to organize and build a consensus with like-minded voters, their reaction has been to “open-carry” their rifles and pistols into spaces frequented by the public: retail shops, restaurants, parks, concert venues, et. al.— the very places it no longer feels safe to be in. This very public “show of force” strikes the intellect as a silly yet hazardous means of reclaiming white privilege.
Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and respected observer of Nazi war criminal prosecutions, has written, “Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one. another.”
The domestic cult that the Second Amendment has convened and nourished over the last forty years, reflects that very appeal — attracting people who live in “isolation and fear of one another.” Nothing says cozy, interpersonal relationships among citizens like walking around strapped to the gills like a soldier of fortune.
American culture has evolved beyond the parameters that once respected white privilege, so it has become an act of defiance, by those left behind, to walk into a Subway shop holstering a shiny, black 9mm. Because of the enormous legal loophole that the Second Amendment has metastasized into — allowing unaccountable access to mass casualty weapons — it turns out we have traded public safety of the common good for the cultural assurance of those who’ve endured the erosion of their traditional privilege.
Contrary to popular belief among the open-carry crowd, the Second Amendment wasn’t adopted as a response to the fear of tyrannical government. By the time the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, the U.S. Congress had already established a standing army of a mere several hundred soldiers in 1789.
The concerns expressed by slave-holding delegates like Patrick Henry and George Mason, were relevant to the common-place revolts inside slave states. They sought and acquired the power for the states to arm their militias, independent of federal intervention. As the Constitution read, before the addition of the Second Amendment, the federal government was under no obligation to arm and staff the militias required to quell slave rebellions.
Because of how far the Second Amendment cult has run away with paragraph two of the Bill of Rights — opening the floodgates of bloodshed unlike anywhere else on the planet — it stands to reason to interrogate the specious reasoning ascribed to the Second Amendment.
It is immoral not to acknowledge the Second Amendment’s legacy attached to the institution of American slavery, which also depended on the other scourge known as white supremacy. That a certain segment of white male citizens has embraced the Second Amendment as a kind of existential talisman accounts for its origin as a statute reinforcing white ‘superiority’.
The twisted irony of the amendment’s actual wording (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”) is that it had the temerity to ply the phrase ‘free State’ while the security of a slave state depended on the brazen exploitation of a captive population.
Until a greater consensus of voters and policymakers concede the Second Amendment’s sadistic legacy, there won’t be much ground to gain from those who’ve held the statute hostage under the most questionable of premises.
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Previously Published on Medium
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