There are a lot of things that the rightwing seems to be having trouble swallowing about their various presidential nominee candidates. Among the front runners you have serial marriage coupled with questionable divorce practices, abortion support (or at least tepid abortion opposition), big government practices, and so on. The one that still amazes me is that some get panty-torqued over Rudy Guiliani's history of "gun grabbing" as New York City Mayor.

Now whether Rudy deeply respects the second amendment or not is trivial me because the amendment itself is a joke. A bad joke with a lethal punch line.

Set the wayback machine to 1789, Sherman.

The American Colonies had won independence from the brits and, after a decade under the Articles of Confederation, had passed the US Constitution just two years earlier. In '89 The Bill of Rights was being written by Madison as a modification of the Constitution spelling out what, at the time, were the most important rights to guarantee citizens. It's important to understand the time and place of the amendment to understand why it was created. What was to become the US had been part of the british empire and had been rather poorly treated. The british had tried to maintain power in the rebelious colonies through force of arms, which at the time meant black powder muskets, cavalry, and horse drawn cannons. The weapons of a soldier of the world's superior military were virtually no different than the weapons used by a hunter taking down dear. The colonies, of course, had to use militias to fight the british because they had no formal military as they were in rebelion against their government.

From this position the second amendment took shape. There are actually two forms of the Amendment. The first is what the house and senate passed, it reads:

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.

The second is what was sent to the states to ratify:

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.

The differences are fairly important since the first implies that it is the militia that cannot be infringed and the latter implies that it is the right to bear arms that cannot.

...but either way the amendment is utterly inapplicable to modern life. In the first place it does not, as the NRA claims, provide for the ownership of any weapon the citizen might want. A strict originalist reading entitles citizens to 18th century muskets. A more generous reading allows for the ownership of militia appropriate weapons. The problem with that interpretation is that militias are no longer effective fighting forces, they can no longer guarantee "the security of a free State." A bunch of hill billies with splatterguns are by no stretch of the imagination more than a road bump for the United States military.

If evidence of this is needed one need only look at Ruby Ridge. Despite having quite the arsenal, Randy Weaver was easily taken out by Marshalls and the FBI. Hopefully I don't have to point out that the FBI is many orders of magnitude weaker when it comes to force projection than, say, the Marine Corps.

The concept that owning guns protects you from a rogue government is simply false. The times have changed. Now some might argue that Iraq is direct evidence that an informal militia with simple weapons can threaten the US military. The problem with that argument is that by far the most successful tactic of the insurgency in Iraq is the use of improvised explosive devices, home made bombs using common items like cell phones for triggers. When they try stand up attacks with rifles they are almost always mown down by the vastly superior conventional arms of the US Army.

In an insurgency the key is to blend into the crowd. A guy carrying an AR15 doesn't blend in so well. A guy carrying soap chips does. Rather than being an aid against a hostile government owning guns is actually a hinderance in this day and age. You are far better off with a chemistry set.

And, specifically aginst the US government, there is a far better weapon. The biggest weakness of the US government that individual citizens could be armed to take advantage of, in case of despotism, is the computer infrastructure. In other words if you want to be armed against the government learn to hack/crack/phreak. That makes you much more of a threat.

At the same time the second amendment offers no guarantee of right to own weapons to protect against crime. Not one word. Even if we allow for the right to bear arms against criminals such a need is much better fulfilled through non-lethal weapons such as tasers and mace as these will generally not be fatal during the inevitable accidents while still providing consistent incapacitation of a threat. Nor does the second amendment provide for the right to own hunting weapons. It only provides for a milita, and that is sadly outmoded.

The second amendment is nothing more than a vestigial apendage left over from a time when our society and technology were far less evolved.