Recently I discovered what the inimitable MrBrink at Bob Cesca's blog called "the Magical Second Amendment Wormhole in the Gun-Nut Continuum": the idea that gun prices, i.e., the requirement that I pay money for my gun before exercising my fundamental God-given right to "keep and bear" it, is an infringement of that right. Gun prices are an impediment to my keeping and bearing certain specific weapons, particularly those that are too expensive for me to buy.
Gun fans tend to either ignore or reject the notion that most non-gun-fans accept, viz., that there are certain kinds of weapons we can have and certain kinds of weapons we can't, and shouldn't, have. Their view is, either I can have any weapon I want, or the Second Amendment is violated. Although the cool thing about American law is that we can have (and always have had) both gun control and the Second Amendment at the same time, many gun fans insist that we can't have both, that the former completely negates the latter and vice-versa.
So, the question then becomes, if gun laws violate the Second Amendment by preventing me from having the particular weapon I want, even though there are any number of other weapons that I can have, why doesn't the price of that particular weapon also violate the Second Amendment for the same reason? If licensing, registration and background checks violate the Second Amendment by making me do things I don't want to do before I get my rightful gun, and as a condition of my getting my rightful gun, why doesn't the requirement that I pay money for that gun also violate the Second Amendment for the same reason?
Every now and then I take this idea back to HuffPo and conduct another little improv act in one of the comment threads, trying to get both gun fans and gun-control advocates to come up with an honest, objective, principled distinction between gun laws and gun prices as impediments to gun ownership, and hence as infringements of gun rights and violations of the Second Amendment. No one can do it. Whether they realize I'm pulling their leg or not, and no matter which side they are on, they can't make an argument that distinguishes the two without resorting to false analogies, false statements about what the Constitution says or doesn't say, and subjective interpretations of the law and the Second Amendment (including more heaping helpings of the insufferable self-regard of gun fans).
The best anyone has been able to do, albeit without realizing or admitting it, is to show that gun prices are an infringement that we're willing to tolerate and allow, because we're OK with who is doing the infringing and why. We understand that consumer goods cost money and we don't begrudge the manufacturers and sellers for doing their business and making a buck. We therefore don't perceive that anything is being maliciously "done to us" by anyone; no singular, conscious entity is deliberately "taking things away" or "violating our rights" or whatever. But if it's the law that gets in the way, then it's "The Government" or "The Liberals" or "Obama" or "The Gun Grabbers" or some other fictional Golem who's "doing this to us" out of arbitrary meanness. In other words, we don't see infringement in gun prices because we don't see an infringer, but we do see infringement in gun laws because we do see an infringer. Or, in the alternative, we don't see infringement in gun prices because we like the infringer and we like what the infringer is doing, but we do see infringement in gun laws because we don't like the infringer and therefore anything the infringer does is malevolent.
But I went over all this in my previous diary on this topic. The fact remains that since I wrote that, no one on either side has been able to explain, in a logical way consistent with the text of the Constitution, an objective, principled reason why gun laws violate the Second Amendment but gun prices don't. It's not that I actually believe that gun prices infringe on anyone's rights -- I don't, and they don't -- but understanding the reason why, i.e., why one thing infringes and one doesn't, is just as important. If gun laws infringe but gun prices don't, what's the objective legal or constitutional principle that distinguishes them?