Replies (1)

• @LukefromDC@kolektiva.social 2026-01-28 19:02

  @phl@mastodon.social @jonah@mastodon.neat.computer First things first: Trump is defying the Second Amendment because he is defying nearly all of the US Constitution. It is the First, 4th, and 14th Amendments he is shitting on the most, as well as almost all of the separation of powers language in the original document. Specific to last week in Minneapolis: having a gun is no guarantee of WINNING an armed confrontation, but it means you at least have a chance to fight it. Short version: this is not about a cop looking for an excuse for murder using having a gun as that excuse. It is about being able to obtain that gun in the first place. The fact that Trump now opposes the Second Amendment as part of a constitution he repudiates does not make all the guns bought by trans folks, queer folks, people of color, and progressives since 2020 magically disappear. The Second Amendment was never meant to apply to people of color or other oppressed groups in the US. Before the First Civil War, both arming an enslaved person and teaching them to read were felonies and SCOTUS had no problem with that. It is still considered a felony for an undocumented migrant to have a gun. What the Second Amendment does mean however is this: the current gun control laws have been ineffective at disarming these social groups as the kind of broad control and muscular enforcement we see with European gun laws has been off the table long enough for the people Trump is fighting to arm themselves without having to turn to underground arms merchants who charge much more. During the early 1990's in Washington DC, a semiauto AK-47 platform rifle that sold for maybe $400 in a Maryland gun store was reportedly worth at least $2,000 on the streets of DC, about 5x as much. To put it another way, the Second Amendment has lowered the financial cost of arming social sectors Trump has declared war on by 80%. Whether those arms are effectively used or people are shot down without ever touching their guns has nothing to do with the Second Amendment unless they are ONLY a gun owner. It has everything to do with training. If you are first disarmed by a cop and THEN shot that is murder no matter what you were doing. If you intended to use that gun for defense, losing it to your attackers is a training issue (gun retention). There is of course also training in disarming opponents, I myself learned how to do that as a child and to this day my automatic reaction to an enemy reaching for a weapon inside ten feet is to jump them before they can draw assuming we are not already grappling. If you are already in a grappling fight of course there is no need to charge, your enemy's gun is already in range. This is what the cops exploited last week in Minneapolis. Since ICE was acting illegally the 2nd Amendment can only speak after the fact. Trump's regime is of course 100% lawless, so just as the First Amendment doesn't bind them neither does the Second. That however does not make all the guns in the hands of those who are not white cishet Christian conservatives magically vaporize into iron vapor. It's too late for that, and this is one of many factors being credited for ICE's morale cracking.

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