by Rebecca Baumgartner
A little over a year ago, in Allen, Texas, we saw the precise moment when a “good guy with a gun” became a “bad guy with a gun.” It turns out that the line between these two different types of people (and there are only two, we’re told) is as slight as a finger squeezing a trigger. Certainly nothing prior to that trigger-squeeze at the Allen Premium Outlets was illegal. In Texas, as of 2021, someone can legally carry eight guns in public – without a license or permit of any kind.
Under Texas’ recently expanded “open carry” law, you can take as many guns as you want into a library. You can take as many guns as you want into the state Capitol building in Austin. You can take as many guns as you want with you while walking down the street.
This is called freedom.
It’s a freedom that requires you to accept some logical catch-22s, though. For example, the dividing line between a law-abiding citizen exercising his supposed right to bear arms and a mentally unstable man who should never have had a gun in the first place is only discernible after he has killed people. Once someone becomes a gun-wielding maniac, they retroactively never should have been allowed to have a gun. (It’s a shame they don’t have the courtesy to tell us ahead of time that they’re the bad guys.)
You can get around this conundrum if you believe in a world where people are either all good or all bad, and we can tell the difference. Gun extremists believe in a fairytale world split into dark and light. They would have us believe that it’s just a matter of finding out who falls into which camp. The forces for good get as many guns as they want and are trusted implicitly, and the forces of darkness are (somehow, without legislative intervention) kept from getting guns. And then the good guys with guns keep us safe from the bad guys with guns. Just like in stories.
But notably, and tragically, this is precisely what does not tend to happen during mass shootings in the real world. This is not what happened at the Parkland school shooting or the Orlando nightclub shooting. This is not what happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, either. The good guys with guns just stood there, scared out of their minds, while people died.
Why would we expect anything different? Having good intentions and a handgun does not magically give you the training, skill, and foolhardiness that it would require to take on someone with a body-armor-piercing AR-15. (This is why it’s profoundly stupid to think that arming teachers is any kind of solution. If trained police officers respond, understandably, with fear and confusion and incompetence, what chance do schoolteachers have?)
The good guy argument is a trick. And we’re too old to be falling for it, over and over again. As Dominic Erdozain says in his book One Nation Under Guns (2024),
“…the status of the law-abiding citizen is preserved by a trick of language. Law-abiding citizens, we are told, have a right to arm themselves against criminals and madmen. When one of them acquires a private arsenal and murders more than fifty people from a hotel room, his status is reassigned, and we are told that he should never have had a gun in the first place. One law-abiding citizen has become a ‘wolf,’ and the concept survives the trauma.”
Too many people think that acquiescing to this childish, distinctly American notion of good and evil is inevitable. They point to the Constitution. Even some gun control advocates hasten to assure us that they wouldn’t dare try to touch the Second Amendment, which has been raised to the status of holy scripture in these debates.
But here’s what too few people are asking: What does the Second Amendment actually guarantee, if anything?
To answer this question in good faith, you have to read the Second Amendment and understand the eighteenth-century political context. Let’s take a closer look at the words that supposedly allow someone to take eight weapons, without a license, to a public place. And let’s try to figure out why the drafters of the Bill of Rights could have (apparently) wished to allow such a thing. This is bound to anger some, but surely, if people can be expected to give up their lives for someone else’s constitutional right, those who believe in that right can withstand a few moments of discomfort as we examine the basis for their beliefs. It won’t kill them, after all.
To start with, the text. Conservatives have a habit of quoting only a portion of the Second Amendment – the abridged version, if you will, with the inconvenient parts skipped over. Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the Supreme Court, and the NRA (coincidentally, I’m sure) have all been strangely reluctant to recite the Amendment in its entirety. Here’s the whole thing:
“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.”
To fully understand what this means, you must be aware that in early America, local militias were defensive units comprised of civilians and were envisioned as a way of defending communities against the incursions of professional, federally organized armies. The language of this Amendment is designed to allow amateur militias to defend their communities against standing armies. It does not mention individuals in their private capacity as householders.
You can see why conservatives tend to leave out the first 13 words of the Amendment – roughly half of it. Those are the 13 words that make it clear this is a collective right of “the people” in the course of required service in a militia, not of any particular individual. As Erdozain explains, “The states wanted a guarantee that if Congress failed to arm the militias, they could do so themselves.” This was written during the thick of the Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debates. The Anti-Federalists wanted an assurance that the militias in their communities would be able to arm themselves against the might of a federal army. This is not to be understood as an entitlement to amass guns for personal use.
At the time, Alexander Hamilton was the only one prescient enough to see the potential for the Amendment to be misinterpreted. No one could have predicted that militias would eventually fall by the wayside, making the first half of the Amendment nearly incomprehensible without some historical understanding. And it’s telling that Hamilton imagined how the Second Amendment could become the target for unscrupulous minds. As, indeed, it has.
The uncomfortable reality about the Second Amendment is this: The eighteenth-century concept of a militia is obsolete, and therefore any rights pertaining to an obsolete institution are likewise obsolete.
There is a winding, complex, and heartbreaking story about guns in America that unfolds from 1791 onwards and carries us, one act of corruption after another, to the present moment. Once militias lost their relevance in daily life, self-serving politicians and judges – the very unscrupulous minds Hamilton warned us about – put the interests of slaveholders, gun owners, vigilantes, and, eventually, gun manufacturers above serving the Constitution, with results that we can all see.
In particular, the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) erased the Second Amendment’s dependency on service in a militia and erroneously claimed that the Amendment has always been about an individual’s right to self-defense. This deliberate misreading of the Second Amendment was paid for by the gun lobby. It erases the historical meaning of the first 13 words and leaves us with state-sanctioned tyranny, the very opposite of its intended purpose. As Erdozain explains in One Nation Under Guns,
“The great irony of American gun culture is that when individuals insist on unlimited access to weapons, they are closer to the values of the monarchy that the founders wanted to escape than the republic they actually established.”
And now, because the Supreme Court has allowed the gun lobby to influence the meaning of our governing documents, “we kill over music at gas stations, or for talking during a movie. And this is called freedom.”
When you look back over this vista – from a belief that state militias had a right to defend themselves against the federal army, to a society where people kill each other for talking during a movie – your heart can’t take it.
As I said, this line of inquiry is probably upsetting to many who have grown accustomed to simply parroting the phrase “Second Amendment rights” without knowing what that really means. These people – most of whom are not going to become mass shooters and who deserve to be educated, not scorned (except for Ted Cruz) – believe they are being good patriots by saying this. The problem is, it’s not patriotic to uphold an incorrect understanding of what our founding documents say. In fact, the patriotic thing is to insist on the correct meaning of these documents, shedding light on them with a fuller knowledge of the historical context.
There are some who believe that claiming a section of the Bill of Rights is now obsolete is traitorous or un-American. I can see why they think that, because most of us were taught in grade school that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are finished and perfect. Most of us never even get far enough into U.S. History to realize that the Constitution was changed as recently as 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18. These documents change. They are supposed to change. The original pieces of parchment the Constitution was written on are artifacts, but the rights and obligations they codify are not.
Those who oppose this way of thinking are trapped in a mindset of believing the Constitution is untouchable, that it is too precious to mess with, that it is merely there to receive our reverence. But this is not how governments or societies work. They evolve, and the laws we create are there to serve us, not the other way around. It’s not traitorous to acknowledge that the America of 2024 is not the same place as the America of 1791. In fact, it’s impractical to do otherwise.
We need to remind ourselves that a human being’s right to life, liberty, and happiness (which surely includes the ability to visit public places without fear) is more precious than preserving a particular interpretation of an Amendment – particularly when that interpretation has been bought and paid for by those with a conflict of interest. The Second Amendment was never about the good guys vs. bad guys dichotomy that gun extremists would have us believe in today. That myth was created to preserve political and financial power, and it’s kept alive by the basest instincts of human nature and a whole lot of cash.
We need to shift our focus. What we need to hold at the forefront of this debate is not the scripture of this country’s founding and the myths and worshipful obedience that have sprung up around it, but the people, here and now, we are tacitly willing to sacrifice to keep that myth going. As Dominic Erdozain says, “The real casualty is not the Constitution: it is the lives that are sacrificed to the myth.”
No one volunteers to be such a sacrifice, but something as simple as going to school in America enters you into the running whether you like it or not. Perhaps the most poignant protest sign I’ve seen is one that read “Am I next?” held by a 10-year-old boy. The gut-wrenchingly honest answer is: “Yeah, you might be.”
It’s time for Republicans to stop hiding behind the Constitution to justify their collusion with the gun industry. We are doing the Constitution and its creators a grave disservice by pretending like they ever sanctioned the bloodshed we call freedom.