My Monday column begins the week with some fireworks:
Before I begin, I hasten to underline that the chances of this happening are pretty much zero: there’s simply no way the Second Amendment will be repealed or clarified. But it should be, and I’m open to either possibility. But I think it makes sense, in the broader gun debate, to debate the validity and applicability of the Second Amendment in our modern context. What’s its purpose? Why is it still necessary? Why acquiesce the points of its loudest supporters?
The only legitimate reason it exists in 2013 is to provide a disproportionately sacrosanct, nearly biblical cover for the corporate, for-profit gun manufacturing industry. There’s simply no other use for it, especially within a document filled with timeless and fully legitimate human rights.
Put another way: the Second Amendment is no longer a necessary means of self-preservation, as perhaps it might’ve been in a rural, agrarian, semi-hostile, slave-holding, post-colonial America. Absent the hazards of the late 18th Century, it’s strictly become a means of protecting the availability of a retail product. Hardware. A hobby. Guns are a product which we don’t really need, and which is statistically bad for you, that is unless you’re a beneficiary of the corporate success of the businesses marketing and selling these products.
Therefore, I have no hesitation declaring the original intention of the Second Amendment to be dead. [continue reading here]