Pleading the Second

A pet peeve of mine is when gun fetishists are unthinkingly assumed to be Second Amendment supporters. Mostly because they keep insisting they are. They are not.

I support the Second Amendment. All of it. All 27 words. Gun fetishists do not. They read it selectively. They don’t acknowledge or accept all 27 words. These self-proclaimed Second Amendment advocates act as if the framers of the Bill of Rights only wrote about half those words.

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.

That’s the Second Amendment, in its entirety. That’s not how gun fetishists read it. They pretend the constitutional amendment’s authors merely wrote that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The reference to a well regulated Militia is an encumbrance on their agenda, so they ignore it.

They refuse to forthrightly consider what the word Militia meant at the time the amendment wa…