Back in the 1980’s when the gun industry decided that being a patriot was a better way to sell guns than being a hunter, all of a sudden the 2^nd Amendment became a big deal. Nobody ever cared about it or talked about it when I was growing up.

              Then a group of conservative lawyers decided to make a big deal out of pushing an ‘originalist’ approach to the Constitution, which means that the country should be run the way it was run before the Industrial Revolution. So, they got their buddy, Tony Scalia, to write an opinion about the 2^nd Amendment in 2008 which said that Americans could keep a handgun around for self-defense.  Then the 2^nd Amendment became a revered and iconic totem for Gun-nut Nation today.

              Is there any connection at all between the existence of the 2^nd Amendment and the fact that Americans appear to be using guns to kill and injure each other right now at an extraordinary rate?

              In a word: Nope.

              Yet I keep getting emails from well-intentioned members of Gun-control Nation who believe that the way to reduce gun violence is to either rewrite the 2^nd Amendment so that it no longer gives Constitutional cover to owning guns for self-defense or junking the whole thing altogether.

              Frankly, I think either approach would be a waste of time and here are the reasons why.

              `First, most of the guns that Americans own do not play any role in gun violence events. You don’t take Grandpa’s old shotgun off the wall and use it for a drive-by shooting at a bunch of people waiting to get into a club.

              Second, the 2^nd Amendment lets you keep a handgun in your home, but it doesn’t say anything about what you need to do to buy that gun. And the courts have held again and again that jurisdictions can decide what kind of guns you can own in that jurisdiction, rulings that are challenged by Gun-nut Nation but are upheld every, single time.

              When the town of Highland Park passed a law requiring town residents who owned an AR-15 to either get rid of the gun or live somewhere else, the challenge went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the so-called ‘conservative SCOTUS refused to even hear the case.

              We passed our first federal law that defined the 2^nd Amendment in 1934. This law (NFA34) allows the government to decide whether certain guns are too lethal to be sold without all kinds of regulatory constraints. Which is why there hasn’t been an injury due to the intentional use of a machine gun since 1946.

              If we stuck bottom-loading, semi-automatic pistols that shoot military-grade ammunition on the list of guns that are too lethal to be sold with just a background check, we’d get rid of gun violence right away. 

              The reason that countries like Italy, France and Spain don’t have gun violence is because you can’t just walk into a gun shop in Rome, or Paris, or Madrid and come out ten minutes later with a Glock. These countries all passed gun-control laws which copied our NFA34, but the reason they made handguns verboten is because they wanted to protect the government from armed political threats from the Left or the Right.

              Notice how many of the great patriots who stormed up the Capitol steps on January 6^th were carrying guns. One? Two? For all the talk in Gun-nut Nation about the 2^nd Amendment protecting us from government ‘tyranny,’ I notice that the Proud Boys and Three Percenters and all those other schmucks left their guns at home.

              Want to end or at least reduce gun violence? Get rid of the guns that are used to cause the violence. In fact, putting semi-automatic pistols on the restricted list that was created by NFA34 doesn’t even require a new law at all.

              When David Chipman takes over the ATF, he can publish such a directive in the Congressional Record, give Gun-nut Nation 60 days to bitch and moan, get Joe Manchin to shut up, and that’s the end of that.