I live in an amazing country built on a brilliant foundation of documents supporting complex and nuanced ideas. The authors of these documents were very complicated European white men fully aware of their sins and willing to write aspirational documents that describe a society's potential even when that potential far exceeds their own behavior.
Unlike the Bible which unintentionally contradicts itself while claiming to be infallible, the Constitution is amazingly consistent with its highest principles even as the writers went out of their way to write other letters and articles to make sure that future decision-makers knew that the document was fallible, fragile and in need of constant editing. (These concerns are organized in a book called The Federalist Papers edited by Madison, Hamilton and Jay with Franklin and Washington's contributions included.)
In an amazing level of horrific irony, the people who are now demanding that the Constitution be treated with the same level of infallibility as the Bible are Evangelicals. Take a moment to process that.
So, the Constitution is the deer.
The founding fathers were human. They were far from perfect. They knew it. These founding fathers were the first to point out that the 2nd Amendment was a horrible compromise.
The 2nd Amendment is the snake.
The Federalist Papers reveal that the founding fathers were sharply divided over the possibility that an individual state would create a militia (an army) that had the resources to go to war against the national government. Why? At the time, the British were very deeply engaged in trying to create guerrilla armies within some of the states. The British were seeding the roots for an insurrection that could throw a young government into chaos. Many local politicians were "on the fence" about siding with the new country or their old friends, the British.
So, the "federalists" were arguing that only the Federal government could build and maintain a standing army for the common defense of the nation (especially from the British.) While the small "r" republicans were arguing for state's rights. The debate was legitimate. The state's rights defenders had a noble argument that the last thing anybody wanted was a president declaring himself King and a Federal Government that started treating the states the same way that the British has treated these states. Each state having a well-regulated militia was a defense against that possibility.
The debate went on for a very long time and there was no time to stall, what with the business of giving birth to a nation being quite demanding and all that.
So, James Madison, normally an awesome wordsmith, cobbled together this brutal sentence:
"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."
Whoa. WTF? James old boy, what does that even mean? - And yet, the other authors went with it. Ben Franklin was probably the most certain of all that a future Congress, just a few short years down the road, would edit the damned thing.
What everybody (before the NRA became the NRA-ILA in the 1970's) can agree on is that James Madison was giving the individual States permission to create a WELL REGULATED MILITIA as an insurance policy against a Federal Government and a President of the United States that decided to choose tyranny over democracy.
This used to be common knowledge. Not anymore, of course.
Over the last 50 years, the slimy little green snake that was the Second Amendment has swollen to become a massive Burmese Python.
Ben Franklin would be stunned. The Amendment about the states having their own armies would not be refined and edited by an early Congress but instead, Americans would wait for 185 years and then allow a private lobbying organization to chop off the first half of the one-sentence amendment and create this:
"The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Incredibly, the NRA-ILA would be so effective that the Supreme Court would ratify the intent of this new version of the 2nd Amendment even though Congress never passed any such thing.
Truly a disaster with existential portent.
Today, our country is fast becoming a nation where every person is armed. Not good enough, every person needs to be armed with a state-of-the-art human killing machine. Hunting, sporting, and self-defense are, at best, a smoke screen for a nation equipping itself so that every citizen is poised to kill any other citizen should they so desire.
Even the noblest version of a “well-regulated militia” - the modern police force - is deteriorating into bands of uber-paranoid enforcers using guns to survive rather than to protect. Who can blame them? They are trying to enforce the law in a nation with 400 million guns that are not closely tracked or documented and in the past decade, about 10% of those guns are military assault-style rifles.
In a nation where the majority of citizens are heavily armed, it is impossible for any of the other ideals expressed in the Constitution and in The Declaration of Independence to stand.
The First Amendment is a joke when anybody can shoot somebody for saying something they don't like. Would any of us stand up and pronounce our opinions in a crowded room in pursuit of a healthy verbal debate now that the possibility that some other insulted citizen would rather shoot than debate is ever present?
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is a punchline to a god-awful joke in a nation filled with undocumented guns in the hands of unregistered gun owners. You can replace that most beautiful of all ideas with "might makes right" and you can be damned sure that the most aggressive people with the most powerful guns are going to love the idea of tyrants taking political power.
Think about gun trends in the USA and juxtapose that against the opening words of The Constitution of The United States which read like this:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Secure the Blessings of Liberty! Promote the general welfare!! Insure domestic tranquility!!! --- The modern 2nd Amendment just says "hold my beer and get out of my way" to these quaint notions.
The 2nd Amendment has become the snake that is now eating the deer that is the Constitution. We've seen what happens then, the deer dies a horrible death and the snake dies of its own gluttony.
In nature, the deer was just unlucky. In America, the deer is aiding and abetting the snake. That's hard to digest.