By Bear Howard
“Every nation negotiates its own social contract. America, uniquely, accepts mass death as the tithe for its freedom myth.”
Sedona, AZ — Somewhere between the second and third decade of the 21st century, America quietly made a bargain with itself — that gun death would be the price of freedom.
- 491 million civilian firearms now circulate in the United States — more guns than people.
- Only 32 % of adults personally own one; a small “super-owner” group holds nearly half. This is 7.7 million people, or about 3% of the adult population, who own over half the guns. That’s an interesting fact, isn’t it?
- In 2023, firearms killed 46,728 Americans:
- 27,300 suicides (58 %)
- 17,927 homicides (38 %)
- The rest, accidents or police shootings.
For children and teens, guns have become the leading cause of death. Yet the nation carries on, anesthetized by repetition. Every shooting sparks the same ritual: sorrow, outrage, gridlock, forgetfulness.
Gun owners and non-owners now live in parallel psychological republics.
- For owners, the gun symbolizes self-reliance — a talisman of control in an unpredictable world.
- For non-owners, it symbolizes fragility — an object that turns argument into homicide and fear into routine. And depression into self-inflicted death.
This split is more profound than politics; it is metaphysical. One group trusts the gun to preserve order; the other believes it destroys it.
Research spanning decades is unambiguous:
- A gun in the home is more likely to injure or kill household members than to stop intruders.
- Unsecured firearms in the home lead to accidental shootings, with data showing that children under 10 are killed in an unintentional shooting every six days.
- Studies show that residents of a household with a gun face a greater risk of dying from homicide, with the overwhelming majority of these deaths occurring at the hands of a family member or intimate acquaintance.
- States with higher ownership rates have higher gun-death rates, regardless of crime levels.
Yet belief persists that the firearm is a shield — a guardian angel forged in steel. It’s a psychological inversion: danger mistaken for deliverance, sustained by repetition and the mythology of the Second Amendment.
For the two-thirds of Americans who do not own guns, constant exposure to gun news produces a new pathology — collective trauma without remedy.
At first comes grief, then fury, then exhaustion—finally, numbness.
“I care,” people whisper, “but caring changes nothing.”
Psychologists call this psychic numbing — the mind’s self-defense against perpetual heartbreak. Ambivalence becomes a coping mechanism; cynicism a shield—the national conscience flat-lines so that daily life can continue.
Many non-gun-owners are not merely numb to gun death; they have grown dispassionately Darwinian about it. In private, they admit that the endless, unnecessary deaths — suicides, accidents, rampages — now feel like a form of natural selection.
Those who worship the weapon, who accept the slaughter of innocents to preserve ego and imagined moral superiority, are, in this grim logic, self-eliminating. And since many of these deaths take place inside the household and family structure, each death eliminates one person prone to view gun ownership as a necessary component of life, demonstrating the influence of the family members on each other. In a way, this is where natural selection reduces the population of gun owners.
To the non-owner, each tragedy reads like a headline from evolution itself — Darwin at work in the MAGA world — pruning a branch of society enthralled by its own mythology. They no longer rage; they observe. They see a sick America devouring itself, and they have ceased to believe that empathy can cure it. In fact, some, perhaps many, from the MAGA worldview, see empathy as weakness, something to be overcome.
Few nations worship an amendment. America does. The Second Amendment has transcended law and entered theology — treated as God-given, though it was penned by pragmatic men debating muskets.
To question it is heresy in many states. The irony is biblical: a nation that claims to cherish life defends the instruments that most efficiently end it. Gun ownership with strong religious overtones seems to be popular, especially in more conservative communities.
Statistics showing that guns rarely prevent crime bounce off the armor of belief. For millions, the firearm is no longer a tool; it is a totem of belonging, masculinity, and divine favor.
Other democracies tolerate inconvenience — taxes, regulations, waiting periods — to preserve collective safety. America tolerates blood.
We have learned to live with:
- School lockdown drills for children
- Bulletproof backpacks are marketed online
- Politicians offering “thoughts and prayers” instead of policy
Each act of resignation cements the bargain: some must die so others can feel free.
The most recent public discussion about gun ownership was brought to life by the recent murder of Charlie Kirk. But read his words here, perhaps
prophecy to his own doom. “It’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.” — Charlie Kirk
Some facts to ponder:
Firearm Death Rate (2023)
| Country | Gun Deaths per 100 000 |
| United States | 13.7 |
| Canada | 2.2 |
| Australia | 1.1 |
| Germany | 0.9 |
| Japan | 0.1 |
For gun owners, freedom is the right to self-defense.
For non-owners, freedom is the right to live without fear of crossfire.
Both claim the same word; neither hears the other.
Freedom without safety is not liberty — it is entropy disguised as courage.
And a right that produces relentless loss is not divine; it is a human error we refuse to correct.
If America is to heal, it must admit the obvious: the Second Amendment is not sacred — it is amendable. It was written for a frontier world that no longer exists.
To challenge it is not to betray the founders, but to honor them: they built a Constitution meant to evolve with reason and survival.
Until that awakening arrives, the country will continue whispering the same tragic prayer — that the next time will be the last, that the next child’s name will finally end the list.
And when the next echo rings out, we will again call it freedom — and again pretend it was.
And the desensitized, non-gun owners mystified how so many rational humans in America treat guns as a holy relic to embrace, will shrug their shoulders, cry no tears, lose no sleep, turn on their favorite TV series as if nothing has happened worthy of their attention, and pretend the most recent gun deaths did not occur. They are more than ambivalent – many will say to themselves, under their breath, “This is the America that we got. And we can’t fix stupid. We have to step aside and let Darwin do his work.”
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3 Comments
Bear, well written facts and truths. You touched on the hypocrisy of the pro life gun toting shoot first ask questions later 2nd Amendment distortionista’s. You also touched upon the political aspects of gun ownership by millions who should not legally possess them.
MAGA and their NRA sponsors have for decades created the narrative of fear and retribution by Liberals and even the UN coming to take weapons of war out of the hands of civilians who absolutely should not have them. They spurred the narrative that a race war was imminent (one they fail to mention they are eager to and have already started) and the need to stockpile weapons and ammunition to kill their fellow Americans with. They bold face lied about Roe vs Wade being precedent they would abide by while their corrupt lying SCOTUS judges did the exact opposite of what they promised the American people and Congress when they were appointed. They demanded abortion and birth control be illegal in order to preserve life while doing jack shit to stop the greater threat to the living- gun violence! They’re hypocritical about just about everything they whine and cry about from Freedom of Religion (only for Evangelical religious distortionist and abortionist all others have NO rights), Freedom of Speech, except by those who disagree with their racist fascist Project 2025 Agendas. Freedom of the Press, unless you speak ill of King Convicted Felon Insurrectionist. Those who do so are censored, sued and taken off the air while MAGA media sources who spew outrageous lies, disinformation and propaganda are encouraged.
We have ignorant laws allowing minor children to own AR-15’s, AK-47’, SKS’s and even Barret .50 cal rifles manufactured in an array of colors and configurations that appeal to young kids who are far far too immature to responsibly own a firearm. Young men who are (99% of the gun market) do not reach adult maturity until 25-30 years old and yet we allow them to own combat weapons as young as 9 years of age.
MAGA claims Law Enforcement loves and supports them when the fact of the matter is Law Enforcement would much rather not deal with private citizens (children) who possess an armory loaded with combat weapons and ammunition when responding to calls. They think buying a “Thin Blue Line” or “FOP Supporter” decals and displaying them on their cars (they drive as recklessly as they are with their firearms) will get them out of jail for free. The truth is the exact opposite, cops tend to go after people with such decals far more than they do cars without them (unless driven by minorities).
MAGA praises the Orange Insurrectionist when he makes peace deals on top of business deals in foreign countries and yet he does squat to end the senseless killing of Americans by Americans using Military weaponry to do so. It’s always, “thoughts and prayers” “it’s mental health issues killing people not the weapons they do it with” “if we take military weapons out of the hands of civilians then only criminals will possess them”! All lies, all diversions and distractions of truth and fact.
Nobody “needs” an AR style weapon for anything other than to kill as many people as they can with them. True hunters and sportsman don’t use combat weapons to hunt with. They instead respect the skill and challenge required of the hunt rather than the ease of killing with a scoped high powered rifle that that eliminates the need for skill.
It’s true, other countries allow gun ownership. But they also have far stricter background checks and firearms regulations and they generally only permit handguns and shotguns designed for hunting vs weapons designed for the battlefield and high body counts.
Gun ownership is not a right (despite what MAGA claims the 2nd Amendment says but doesn’t), it’s a privilege. It’s a privilege with enormous responsibility behind it considering weapons are designed specifically to kill people and animals. If we are to ever get a grip upon the outrageous number of violent gun deaths in this very divided country it will be because politicians have their access to dark money gun lobbies and their shares of gun manufacturer stocks eliminated not because of any common sense laws. In fact, take the dark money out of politics in general and watch MAGA disappear under the rocks from which they crawled out from under. Dark money is what drives the current corruption and lawlessness in our government. There are no checks and balances, only crimes, criminals and unchecked corruption by convicted felon pardoning fellow convicts so they can conspire to commit more crimes and grift their constituents out of every penny they can.
Take weapons out of the equation and MAGA is a toothless cult of personality. With them they get to pretend to be tough guys and patriots but are in reality the furthest thing one can get from being either.
You didn’t see protesters at the No Kings Rallies standing around strapped with firearms menacing those opposed to them as MAGA/Trump stooges do when they have rallies or want to intimidate people at the ballot boxes. MAGA is bucking for a “Fight” as the Draft Dodger coward likes to say when inciting others to do violence upon his behalf. Their trigger fingers are itching to kill their neighbors and fellow citizens (especially the brown, black, gay and Muslim ones) over political differences created and exasperated by a Convicted Felon Sex Offender and Insurrectionist and a party with a long history of War Mongering, Gun Lobbying, Racism, political crime and corruption and history of the highest rate of violent crimes committed by Americans against Americans.
It’s all one big charade designed to give them all of “the cards” while stacking the deck against Democracy and the rule of law.
SCOTUS Decision on Rahimi Offers Some Hope and a Basis for Resuming the Critique of and Challenge to the Flawed Decisions in Heller and Bruen
Jun 22, 2024
Well, finally a day to celebrate a Supreme Court ruling that begins to address the very real threat of U.S. gun violence, in this case to victims of domestic abuse, and which offers a flicker of hope for the future on the broader gun violence/Second Amendment front.
And perhaps it is worth observing at the outset that SCOTUS justices, no doubt mindful of the turmoil and flawed jurisprudence of the June 2022 Dobbs decision on women’s reproductive rights, may have realized that a ruling in favor of Rahimi would have represented an overwhelming double whammy against America’s women, who are the vast majority of domestic abuse victims.
That aside, a close reading of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts gives one some comfort that the Court might have some self-awareness and has given some confirmation that past Second Amendment rulings are inherently flawed.
For me, the key take aways from the Rahimi decision are found in the concurring opinions of Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Jackson and the solo dissenting opinion of Justice Thomas. Together, these tacitly and even explicitly acknowledge, while justifying their ruling against Rahimi, that the Court broke stark new ground with its Second Amendment rulings in Heller (2008) and Bruen (2022) and that both represent deliberate building blocks for the future evolution of Second Amendment jurisprudence along equally questionable lines.
The concurring opinions of the conservative Justices make much of the Scalia/Heller ruling’s singular focus on individual rights and establishing self-defense as being integral to the Second Amendment. In Heller, Scalia wasted no time in ditching of stare decisis and excising the “well organized militia” clause from the Court’s consideration of the Second Amendment as he “established” the Amendment’s pre-eminent focus on the individual’s right to firearms. In so doing he set the stage in Bruen for Justice’s Thomas’s new fundamental concept of “self-defense” as the Amendment’s “central component”.
Scalia’s departure from the traditional SCOTUS position confirming and recognizing the militia clause deliberately ignored or downplayed the fact that Congress, as the Bill of Rights was undergoing ratification, was concurrently developing and approving legislation meant specifically to regulate the militia cited in the Second Amendment. As a result, the Militia Act was passed and signed into law on May 8, 1792, less than six months after the Bill of Rights was finally ratified (December 15, 1791). Justice Thomas’s beloved “self-defense” phrasing does not appear in the Constitution, initially or as amended by the Bill of Rights, or in the 1792 Militia Act.
There are a number of revelatory comments in the concurring opinions of the concurring Justices and in Thomas’s last man standing dissent. I provide underlines and bolding on key phrases.
Let’s start with Justice Kavanaugh, whose lengthy concurring opinion opens with a consistent description of exactly what the Court did not do in 2008 in voting 5-4 in favor of Justice Scalia’s opinion in the Heller case that the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” clause was irrelevant and inconsequential.
According to Justice Kavanaugh:
· (Pages 1-2) “The first and most important rule in constitutional interpretation is to heed the text—that is, the actual words of the Constitution—and to interpret that text according to its ordinary meaning as originally understood. The text of the Constitution is the “Law of the Land.” Art. VI. As a general matter, the text of the Constitution says what it means and means what it says. And unless and until it is amended, that text controls.”
· (Page 3, with reference to Heller): “From 1791 to the present, “the First Amendment has permitted restrictions upon the content of speech in a few limited areas”—including obscenity, defamation, fraud, and incitement. United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 468 (2010) (quotation marks omitted). So too with respect to the Second Amendment: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited”; it is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
· (Page 10-11) “After ratification, the National Government and the state governments began interpreting and applying the Constitution’s text. They have continued to do so ever since. As the national and state governments over time have enacted laws and implemented practices to promote the general welfare, those laws and practices have often reflected and reinforced common understandings of the Constitution’s authorizations and limitations.”
· (Page 14:) “Justice Scalia wrote for the Court that “a critical tool of constitutional interpretation” is “the examination of a variety of legal and other sources to determine the public understanding of a legal text in the period after its enactment or ratification.” 554 U. S., at 605 (emphasis in original); see also ibid.”
· (Page 22) “Heller indicated that: (i) “prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful”; (ii) the Second Amendment attaches only to weapons “in common use” because “that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons”; and (iii) “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” are presumptively constitutional.”
· (Page 23) “This Court’s approach in those three recent Second Amendment cases—and in the Court’s opinion today—is entirely consistent with the Court’s longstanding reliance on history and precedent to determine the meaning of vague constitutional text. Heller rested on “constitutional text and history,” ante, at 6 (quotation marks omitted), and laid the foundation for McDonald and then Bruen.”
· (Page 24) “As the Court’s decision today notes, Second Amendment jurisprudence is still in the relatively early innings, unlike the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments, for example. That is because the Court did not have occasion to recognize the Second Amendment’s individual right until recently.”
For his part, Justice Gorsuch starts with a “textualist” misrepresentation of the Second Amendment in his assertions and offers a disingenuous prediction of what happens when judges are allowed to veer from text and history, as has happened in Heller and Bruen, and arguably Cargill:
· (Page 1) “As this Court has recognized, too, the Amendment’s text “‘guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.’”
· Page 5) “Come to this Court with arguments from text and history, and we are bound to reason through them as best we can. (As we have today.) Allow judges to reign unbounded by those materials, or permit them to extrapolate their own broad new principles from those sources, and no one can have any idea how they might rule.”
Lastly, we have Justice Jackson to thank for clarity in summing up what has really been going on with the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment in this gun lobby hey day since the early 2000s:
· (Page 4): “To be sure, our decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570 (2008), which first recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, see id., at 628, was disruptive in its own way. After all, before Heller, “[t]he meaning of the Second Amendment ha[d] been considered settled by courts and legislatures for over two centuries,” and “judges and legislators . . . properly believed . . . that the Second Amendment did not reach possession of firearms for purely private activities.”
While many if not most observers are accepting of the SCOTUS decisions on Heller and Bruen, it is clear that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson see serious flaws in both. Unfortunately, none have yet stepped forward, as did Justices Stevens and Breyer in their Heller dissents, to highlight, explain and seriously challenge the radical departures from stare decisis embodied in Scalia’s arguments in Heller, departures clearly recognized by Justice Kavanaugh writing in Rahimi.
That Kavanaugh cites Heller in acknowledging that restrictions on “dangerous and unusual weapons” are constitutional, would suggest a position that on its face would allow a ban on assault weapons but for Scalia and Thomas’s recasting of such dangerous modern weapons as being in common use and thus no longer subject to restrictions of any kind.
So where does Rahimi’s glimmer of hope leave us today going forward?
To this concerned citizen, it would seem to be a propitious time to exploit the obvious contradictions in the justices’ varied arguments in Rahimi, particularly those that clearly run counter to stare decisis prior to Heller and Bruen as well as counter to Heller and Bruen themselves. Public commentary by leading legal scholars and experts, and knowledgeable opinion makers, should make the case for a clear and true reading of the history of the Second Amendment and related 1792 Militia Act, which together reflect an accurate portrayal of Congressional intent and legislation during the time the Bill of Rights was enacted.
It took the NRA and other key players in the gun lobby thirty years to impact the Supreme Court via Heller, and sustained pressure since to achieve the decisions on Bruen and Cargill. So we should expect it will take years, if not decades, to win the battle to restore normalcy and long-established stare decisis to the debate on and understanding of the Second Amendment.
The particular politics surrounding the SCOTUS Rahimi decision and Dobbs decision two years before presented real obstacles for the Court and, given political realities, it seemingly opted not to allow Rahimi to compound the popular backlash among women to Dobbs.
This may seem overly nuanced to some, but it does offer an opportunity and clear justification to resume the arguments made by dissenters Justices Stevens and Breyer in Heller to begin to try to overturn the gun lobby’s false narrative that has led to such violence in our great country.
It’s a time for hope and for renewed commitment to getting the Second Amendment right, both in understanding its conception in the 18th century and its impact today in the 21st. Let’s continue on, and stay the course until history and common sense prevail in our highest court and legislative bodies.
On to the next 2nd Amendment case while the drum beat of deadly firearm violence continues unabated. Please join this important effort in support of a 2nd Amendment for 21st century America.
So… no individual gun rights, unvetted migration for all, cops who recommended people comply with home invaders, theft decriminalized, and lax criminal sentencing broadly?
I’m 100% certain you’ll miss the irony, but your chaos is the direct line to a king who will be welcomed with open arms.