The Second Amendment: Sacred Until Inconvenient

A Thought Experiment

It is a curious feature of the modern American conservative that he can, with one breath, declare himself a constitutional originalist while, with the next, applaud the steady evisceration of the very document he claims to revere. The Constitution, we are told, is an unassailable foundation—except when its principles prove inconvenient to the ambitions of a demagogue, at which point it is to be dismissed as a relic, subject to the whims of an orange-faced autocrat and his adoring throng.

Donald Trump, who has never in his life read a legal document longer than a prenuptial agreement, now casually suggests that the Constitution should be, in essence, optional. One might think that such an admission—one that explicitly proposes setting aside the founding legal framework of the republic—would trouble his acolytes, who never tire of declaiming their love for America’s founding fathers, no matter how little they resemble them in intellect, dignity, or understanding of Enlightenment values. And yet, predictably, there has been no such reckoning.

This presents an opportunity. If Trumpism dictates that constitutional fidelity is now a matter of personal preference, then surely it follows that we can re-evaluate other sections of this once-revered parchment. The Second Amendment, for example, that most tediously misinterpreted of legal relics, has been hoisted aloft for decades as an inviolable right, despite the inconvenient comma and the qualifying phrase “well-regulated militia” that the modern gun enthusiast reads with all the comprehension of a cat walking across a keyboard.

But if we are abandoning constitutional consistency, why not start here? If a president can ignore constitutional constraints at will, then the argument for sacrosanct gun rights collapses in the same breath. Those who have been deaf to every plea for basic firearm regulation, who have shouted down every attempt at curbing mass slaughter with screeching references to an 18th-century militia clause, might now find themselves in an uncomfortable position: If the Constitution no longer matters, then neither does their favourite amendment.

The more astute among them might recognize the trap and insist that Trump’s constitutional nihilism should not apply to their God-given right to hoard semi-automatic weaponry. But they would, of course, have no leg to stand on. If constitutional principles are to be discarded when politically expedient, then surely we can do away with the ones that most frequently result in schoolchildren being perforated in their classrooms.

Yet the reality is this: Trumpism does not seek to eliminate the Constitution in its entirety—only the parts that inconvenience the consolidation of power. The right to bear arms will remain unchallenged, not because of any principled defence of liberty but because authoritarian movements thrive on the armed devotion of their followers. The goal is not to remove guns but to ensure that they are in the hands of the right people: the obedient, the fervent, the ideologically aligned. The “well-regulated militia” that the amendment actually describes will remain nothing more than an ironic anachronism, while the very people who screech about government tyranny will happily serve as its armed enforcers.

Thus, the opportunity to expose hypocrisy remains, but any real attempt to dismantle this absurd national obsession with firearms will, of course, be met with the same predictable howling from those who consider a piece of military-grade hardware an extension of their own self-worth. The Constitution, for them, has always been less of a document and more of a buffet—pick the rights that suit, discard the ones that don’t. And when democracy itself is deemed expendable, no one should be surprised that the only amendment left standing is the one that ensures the last remaining function of citizenship: the right to kill.