There are a couple of huge fundamental flaws in your arguments. Lets’s start with your idea of a magic moral arc. The thing is… you obviously believe it too. You believe that guns can move us on to an improved path better than our past cycles. So in no way, is this magic moral arc thing limited to one side of the issue. And in fact there’s nothing wrong with magic moral arcs — it’s the basis of all human morality. Look at it this way: if I don’t believe in the magic moral arc then why bother having guns or not having guns or caring? My actions are meaningless and I might as well just go out in a blaze of glory, or just steal everyone blind until I die, or whatever, because what difference does it make? So every person who is not a complete jerk all of the time believes in a magical moral arc.

So the question is, which magical moral arc is actually supportable by facts? And here’s the thing… this notion that the second amendment is meant to protect us when our government fails? It’s a complete fantasy, based on nothing. Certainly not based on history. This fantasy arose in this country in the latter half of the twentieth century. There’s really no sign of it existing before that—to be clear I’m sure there’s been vestiges of these ideas forever, but they were never significant.

The historical record on this is very clear. Our founders didn’t want us armed to overthrow the government when it goes bad. They were trying to prevent a federal standing army, on the premise that standing armies were inherently dangerous to citizens. So the states and the federal government would have a few professional soldiers (offiicers) available to command an army of state (well-regulated!!!) private citizen militias when needed. It was an experiment… which failed. Because about fifty years later we went ahead and created a standing army. The justification was that citizen militias sucked, and could not be trained fast enough to oppose other countries that had actual standing armies.

It’s sort of related to the modern fantasy, but different in important ways. We weren’t armed against a standing army, because there wasn’t one. We were armed to BE the army when needed. There is no other reading of history that makes any since, and the evidence is vast and clear. Just go on Google Books and start reading what people said about standing armies and the right to keep and bear arms prior to its inclusion in our constitution.

I’ll take this a step further. I believe in America. I am a patriot. I believe our form of government is superior, that it can survive Trump and other internal attempts at overthrow, and still have mechanisms that allow us, the citizens, to deal with it with our votes and our activism. This is what makes America great. Some jerk with a basement full of guns getting ready for the day when he gets to shoot at “the government”??? How is this American? How is this patriotic? And if part of your rationalization is a false narrative about your beloved founding fathers, how is this loving their work if you’re assuming their work is so shitty that you have to shoot it dead? It’s illogical bootstrapping. Either the founder sucked and we can dispense with the second amendment, or the founders were great, and our government is not in need of overthrowing and that was never their intention.

This interpretation is a crazy, un-American danger to the country our founding fathers created. It is utterly unsupported by the history of how our nation was formed. It’s an irrational fringe theory that’s become too popular. It’s time to be finished with that fringe theory and make it clear that it is an un-American belief. Which you’d think would be easy with all the dead American schoolchildren out there.