How does the Second Amendment work? Progressives have no idea

Sneath seems to suggest that the Second Amendment provides some sort of bulwark to protect state militias against congressional infringement. But this is objectively, factually false: Congress has complete control over state militias—the federal government can organize and abolish the militia whenever it feels like it, and for whatever reason—and no serious historical scholar has ever suggested that the Second Amendment somehow circumscribes this congressional power in any way. Put another way: Sneath is implying that the Second Amendment prohibits Congress from doing the very thing Congress is fully empowered to do.

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I am genuinely curious: is there any other constitutional right, or any other constitutional amendment, that is so consistently and so aggressively handled with such base and inexcusable stupidity, on so regular a basis, and on such an industrial scale? I am not sure. You don’t usually see arguments of this idiotic magnitude when it comes to, say, the Fourth Amendment, or the Sixth. You certainly see dumb interpretations of the First Amendment, but that’s usually a matter of degree, not kind: you will have people arguing that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech,” for instance, but nobody ever argues that the First Amendment only applies to state governments, say, rather than to individual members of the body politic.

Only the Second Amendment is subject to such illiterate and ahistorical analyses. Once you realize that, you can fully grasp why : many people simply do not like guns, and they will lie—or else keep themselves deliberately ignorant—to prevent other people from having them.

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