I’m used to people either fundamentally misunderstanding the Bill of Rights, or pretending to misunderstand when it comes to just the 2nd amendment.
But I’m still surprised. Even though the language is a bit dated in style, it’s a remarkably simple document. It doesn’t come close to modern legalese in terms of obtuse and arcane phrases and compound sentences and confusing clauses.

I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s not long at all. The rights enumerated within the bill of rights are actually enumerated, and not granted. That means the framers weren’t coming up with rights, they were listing the pre-existing rights they felt important to human freedom.

And if you read the whole thing, you’ll notice a pattern, which is that each amendment within the bill of rights doesn’t grant anything, but rather, each one prohibits the federal government from making laws abridging any of the rights mentioned. They even have the 9th and 10th amendments listed just to cover all bases, which basically say hey if we left anything off of this list, our bad, they’re still rights that belong to the people, not the government.

I’ve had people argue that things like your right to life, liberty and property ARE up for debate, and I find that to be an odious position held by tyrants and would be-tyrants. But what’s not up for debate is that the bill of rights is written to constrain government, not citizens.

One of those constraints is that the government can not infringe on the people’s right to bear arms. There’s another one in there constraining congress from making laws that infringe free speech. Believe it or not, there’s actually one that says the government can’t force you to have soldiers live in your house. Strange, but true.

None of this suggests that it’s legal or right to shoot your guns off in lieu of fireworks. That’s endangerment. It’s a crime. It has about as much to do with gun ownership as driving a car drunk into a crowd has to do with car ownership. You wouldn’t suggest banning cars just because some people use them incorrectly. Or maybe you would, I don’t know.

If you disagree with the 2nd amendment, that’s fine. But you should try to repeal it instead of arguing about what it means, because there’s little daylight from legal scholars and no daylight from the supreme court: it means the government can’t infringe on people’s right keep, use, own, transport and bear arms.

I get that repealing amendments is hard. It’s supposed to be. People like their rights. Once they have them, trying to take them away is tough. Especially when they’re armed! The framers knew all of this. They wrote about it at length. You could spend days reading the kinds of arguments they made about any one of these amendments.

Maybe you think rights are too inconvenient and we should just scrap the whole thing. Again, you’re not alone. Despots and tyrants will gladly have you in their ranks. They might expect you to take up arms for them though.