This is harsh, but: I don’t trust the public figures that talk big about the 2nd Amendment in this country. Most of them are (1) contemptuous of the other civil liberties—and legislate and lobby accordingly—as well as (2) speak often about large demographic sectors of population that they view as “not really American.”

I’ll go farther and say that a lot of folks—your Huckabees, Breitbarts, and Nugents—really only support the 2nd Amendment because they imagine themselves as counter-cultural figures…specifically, revolutionaries in waiting…and have crafted a mythos in which their manly handling of guns contrasts with effeminate liberal disdain of them (and YES there is a giant gender-essentialist component to it). Were these people in power, given all their wild imagining of who’s destroying or corrupting this country, does it really seem like they would allow liberals, homosexuals, and non-Christians to have easy access to guns?