In full the 2nd Amendment consists of 27 words
Conservatives skip the first 13 and only know the last 14
The military wing of the conservative movement is protected by craven conservative politicians. They can always be called upon to declare that America’s absurdly lax gun laws are not the root cause of periodic attacks by rightwing domestic terrorists. But they are.
The vanguards of the fascist counter revolution, the armed vigilantes who terrorize the good people with mass killing events, are protected by mainstream Republicans. Everyone on Team Elephant is prepared to fight to the death against common sense policies about guns. Usually the perpetrators of murderous violence leave a trail of evidence demonstrating their racial, religious and sexual animus and bigotry. So common is this association of mass murderers with White power and right wing hatreds that when there is no correlation between their politics and their actions it is unusual. We assume now that the rightwing death squads roaming the country have online profiles filled with racial and gender hatreds. Only the rare killer of multiple simultaneous victims is apolitical. To the media a killer without far right convictions was an unusual oddity, a man bites dog novelty.
For reasons unknown this is not true of most one off killers, patiently murdering one person at a time, but almost always true of the white men who kill in quantity. You can just stay where you are, at church, at pre-school, at a movie, and the killers will come to you. Anywhere unguarded is fair game for these hunters of women, children, African or Hispanic or Asian Americans and others in the defenseless multitude.
The Wacko-American community behaves as if the whole of the Bill of Rights is contained in the 2nd of the 10 amendments and the rest are ancillary. This is not true and not what it says. Surely it was not the intent of the founders to elevate the 2nd amendment to make it more important than any of the others.
The constitution’s guarantee of free speech, of religious freedom, of unreasonable search and seizure (and its opposition to a standing army, for that matter) are constrained and limited by the courts, and implemented by laws passed by Congress. Not even the First Amendment is absolute. It is bounded by “time, place and manner” restrictions, as the Supreme Court has ruled. But to Wacko-Americans gun rights are absolute and untouchable. They cite the second clause of the Second Amendment as if it were handed by God directly to our wise nation’s founders. They ignore its first clause as obsolete. Thus, they see “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” while ignoring the reasoning behind it, the first clause, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” The white men, both sane and crazy, who kill innocents to make a point about White superiority and supremacy are many things but in no stretch of the imagination are they in a militia, and they certainly are not defending the security of a free state.
The self-styled militias and violent, armed gangs wearing camouflage operate outside of the law. They use the words of the constitution to somehow, in some twisted way, give their rage-induced diatribes an excuse. The National Rifle Association has a plaque in its lobby citing the 14 words of the 2nd amendment they love but does not contain the first 12 words they loath.
We have guns, the gun-owning population proclaims to all, and if we think you’ve stepped out of line we will use them on you, as frequently as necessary. After a senseless massacre they tell us that it is “too soon” to talk about gun policy, and they insist we limit our response to the slaughter of innocents to thoughts and prayers. They will block any action to address these, which are not at all random acts of violence. It is their sincere belief the right of the people to keep and bear arm shall not be infringed upon by any other constitutional principle. They believe that a massacre of unarmed innocents every six weeks or so by militant right wing extremists — not taxes — is the price of living in a civilized society.