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We must take stock of the landscape and acknowledge an irrefutable reality: There are millions of Americans for whom avoidable deathswhether from guns or a pandemic for which a no-cost, life-preserving vaccine is availableare acceptable, and too many of these millions vote Republican. There are Republicans with whom I once socialized who have acknowledged this to me privately. These are highly educated and highly credentialed people, who work in industries that are far more regulated than the firearm industry. They still believe a Republican is always preferable to a Democrat. This is what political traumatization wreaks: You learn to accept needless death and become indifferent to, if not defend, politically motivated violence, whether its an insurrection at the Capitol or a punch-up at a school board meeting.

We can trace the damage to four words in the Second Amendment: Shall not be infringed. It is these four words that have turned so many of our schools, our banks, our places of worship, our malls, our movie theaters, our workplaces, our Fourth of July parades, our bars and nightclubs, ourreally, just fill in the blankinto blood-splattered abattoirs.

This is where the plot is lost, over four words that denude the Second Amendment of any modern-day contextual value and meaning. Four words useful only in a cloddish defense of guns as instruments in a holy war against imaginary boogeymen: pedophiles, sycophants of Satan, Communist plants, and covert Islamic agitants born in Kenya. Shall not be infringed, because the culture war will yield a new phantasmic threat tomorrow, against whom the GOPs traumatized foot soldiers must stand their ground.

Read the rest here:
I Carry a Firearm Every Day. Yes, the Second Amendment Is Killing Us - The New Republic