The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think it Does

Sep 16

“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.”

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What I find to be the key here is “well-regulated”, the detail that we all ignore. It comes first for a reason. Because yes, the Second Amendment does protect the right to “keep and bear arms”, but it also provides context. This is very important.

However, to be clear before I say anything else, here is a list of things that I am NOT saying in this essay:

Guns should always be illegal.
The Second Amendment should be repealed.
My political opponents deserve to get shot.
Both “sides” are always 100% wrong or right.
All Conservatives are bad.
All Liberals are good.

The list goes on.

I’ve thought about this issue, including the wording of this amendment, a lot. I am part of the generation of American kids that has grown up in a world where it is normal and reasonable to fear that, at any moment, someone could fire shots in my classroom. The generation that has regularly participated in classroom lessons and discussions about the four E’s: educate, evade, escape, and engage. Knowing that procedure was integral to my experience in the American education system. And, unfortunately, it was very useful.

Not only has my generation experienced this kind of fear in the classroom, but we’ve watched shootings occur at school after school, each followed by no real action to prevent something similar from happening again. People offer their thoughts and prayers, but thoughts and prayers do nothing to shield kids from bullets. So, we learned that guns were worth more than our lives.

And everything about that is personal.

In December of 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed six staff members and twenty students, all of whom were six or seven years old. First-graders. (1)

In December of 2012, I was also in first grade. And while they were miles away from me, I couldn’t help but think, when I graduated high school in June of 2024, that they were supposed to be doing the same. But they weren’t. Instead, they were dead.

Their story is only one example of hundreds of tragedies that have occurred on American soil as a result of gun violence.

I was already considering writing about this. But I wasn’t going to. I was going to keep my politics and my writing separate, with very few exceptions. It’s exhausting to try to explain these things to people who are not inclined to listen to me. If I put my entire focus into doing that, I would have no energy left to do anything else. Because the truth is, I could run an entire blog about politics and have something to say every single day.

But last week, I once again had to ask myself: What is wrong with us? At this point, I have half a mind to leave. So much so that I’ve become quite educated on the Canadian visa process. But that feels like surrendering. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not, but it feels like it nonetheless.

So, here we are.

The number one cause of death for kids and teens in the United States is firearm-related injury. It has been since 2020 (2; 3). For five years, we have done nothing to erase the biggest threat to American children, despite the fact that it’s the one thing on the list that we can control.

People who believe things like this are the reason why:

“Clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is gonna solve this problem … Look, I don’t like this; I don’t like to admit this; I don’t like that this is a fact of life.” – Vice President JD Vance (4)
“I think 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.” – Charlie Kirk, right-wing political activist (5)

Nobody deserves to die from gun violence. Nobody. And if you claim to be against gun violence while saying otherwise, you are not as good a person as you think you are.

It’s easy to say that it’s necessary to have “cost” when you never expect that said cost will be you. Because when it finally does hit close to home, you see things differently. It’s a devastating irony as much as it’s a tragedy.

For years, Liberals have spoken out against violence and pushed for stricter gun laws. To protect everyone, but especially children. And for years, Conservatives and the NRA have denied us that security.

And yet, many influential voices who have helped to create our present state of affairs continue to escalate the hate and deliberately misplaced blame in their language…

“The Left is the party of murder.” – Elon Musk, former DOGE head, Tesla CEO (6)
“More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” – Laura Loomer, conservative activist (7)
“These people are evil at their core. The average democrat is filled with hate and glee over political violence. … You just have to crush their movement and lock them up. Anyone who says otherwise has suicidal empathy.” – Laura Loomer, conservative activist (8)
“It’s a real treat to see all these Liberals condemn political violence now… You have blood on your hands.” – Katie Miller, former White House staffer, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (9)
“Whether we want to accept it or not, [the Democrats] are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate?” – Jesse Watters, conservative political commentator, program host on the Fox News cable network (10)
“Civil war.” – Andrew Tate, far-right British American masculinity influencer (11)
“THIS IS WAR.” – Chaya Raichik, creator of the far-right account Libs of TikTok (12)
“The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth underneath it.” – William Wolfe, former Trump administration official (12)
“It’s not gun violence. It’s Democrat violence.” – James Woods, actor, vocal Trump supporter (12)

All coming from the same people who continue to refuse to condemn the insurrection that occurred at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 or the recent killings of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, among countless other unspeakable acts of political violence.

We’re just evil Liberals, whining about how violence isn’t fair and trying to steal away the “right” to possess firearms anywhere and everywhere. Until it’s one of them. Then, it’s our fault. It’s hypocrisy at its finest.

This kind of language shapes how people see their political opponents and makes violence and persecution feel justified. Worse than that, it sets the stage for a large-scale fight in which a lot of people will inevitably get hurt.

It appalls me that people still fall for it. If, somehow, you are someone who has gone along with that rhetoric and I’ve somehow managed to keep you here this long, I am begging you to please wake up.

Because now, I’ve returned to the title of this essay. The Second Amendment DOES NOT say what you think it does.

This was the original draft of the Second Amendment, written by James Madison:

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” (13)

Notice how the ordering is very different from the version we know today.

Debate in the House of Representatives led to a new version, which was eventually sent to the Senate:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.” (13)

The largest change made at this point was, as I’ve pointed out, the reordering of the clauses. It may look like a consequenceless scuffle over language and wording, but it wasn’t. The exact ordering and wording of constitutions and their amendments, as well as laws, is beyond important. Because sometimes, it comes down to the technicalities.

In late September of 1789, the amendment took its final form as we all now know it:

“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.”

Why is it that it was so important for “well-regulated” to come first and “keep and bear arms” to come last? Think about it. And if you can’t figure it out, think harder.

I’m a writer. I love to be picky about every little sentence. How it’s worded, how it flows. I want the experience of reading my work to be seamless.

This is not that.

For all of the issues with the history of this country and its Founding Fathers, this is a case in which they thought ahead. They understood the implications of what they were writing, and they treated the task with the appropriate weight.

And we ignore all of it simply because it doesn’t fit with what we want to hear. It’s exactly the same issue that has created this blame game over who’s responsible for the political violence we’re experiencing at present. Everybody sees and hears what they want to, and nobody actually listens to the truth.

People don’t want to hear about regulation, so they pretend those first words don’t exist. But that doesn’t erase them. It is no accident that the words on the wall of the NRA Headquarters’ lobby are simply “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It is no accident that they ignore the entire first clause of the amendment. (14)

The meaning of “well-regulated” has certainly changed over time, especially as traditional state militias are no longer a reality, and there’s no way for us to know exactly what Madison really meant when he wrote those words. But at their very core, they have always existed to prevent the very state of lawlessness that we are quickly approaching.

What may be surprising to many is that gun regulations were once very normal across the states. In fact, “gun rights and gun control were seen as going hand in hand. Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia” (14).

It wasn’t until 2008 that SCOTUS decided with its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment guaranteed the right of individuals to own guns, going against over two centuries of historical precedent. (15)

Now, it’s the same story over and over again. The level of gun violence in this country is not and should not be normal, and yet, for my entire life, it has been. Why is that? Why do we care more about our right to own a firearm without any restrictions than the safety of ourselves and those around us? Why are we so far removed from the realities of what we’re talking about that we can’t see the implications? And why don’t we protect our children with the same level of devotion with which we protect our guns?

I am not the first person to say this, nor will I be the last, but still: When will enough be enough? I have to wonder if it will be the day when we finally experience complete political collapse.

Like every other word in the US Constitution, “well-regulated” was not a throwaway. It was a safeguard against the very state of affairs we face now, and it’s long past time that we treat it that way.

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Sources (in order of first appearance — updated 15 September 2025)

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