I must be a broken record by this point.
As many of us know and understand, there is no logic to the idea that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides for a personal, individual “right” to buy, sell, trade, own, “keep” or “bear” one particular category of commercial manufactured goods.1
For that to be true, one would have to believe two things that are impossible to believe. One is that The Founding Fathers® purposefully and deliberately meant to exempt an entire category of manufactured goods from commercial regulation, let alone do so regardless of the resulting risk. The other is that they would have selected, from among all the categories of goods available to 18th-century consumers, not food, not clothing, not shelter, not medicine, not fuel for winter nights, but firearms, as the one sole indispensable product to which everyone needs and must have uninhibited access in the commercial marketplace.
If neither of those things are true — and neither is even believable — then the “right” to manufacture, buy, sell, trade, own, “keep” or “bear” mass-produced mechanical killing devices is a sham; as the late former Chief Justice Warren Burger famously called it, “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public."
It is indisputable that guns are products; manufactured commercial goods, nothing more. Any conversation about gun control has to begin and end with that empirical fact. Guns are naught but mass-produced manufactured mechanical killing devices sold for [considerable] profit on the commercial market. Nothing in the Second Amendment, and certainly nothing in its actual history, prohibits their regulation for public safety purposes alongside other dangerous products (like, e.g., motor vehicles, power tools, heavy equipment, pesticides, explosives, toxic chemicals, &c.). Exempting them from such regulation makes no sense, logically, legally, economically, or historically.1
[1 — There was, therefore, no logic to the SCOTUS’ Heller decision, which nonetheless upheld and ratified most forms of gun control. I do, however, hope that the Right Reverend Justice Scalia and his esteemed brethren provided the NRA with a receipt for services rendered.]
But opposition to gun control, to the extent it's not about industry profits, is not about the products themselves or the markets in which they’re sold. It is, and has always been, about personal hero-fantasies. That’s what the NRA and the gun lobby have always been selling. And that really is impossible to deny. And that’s what I’ve been seeing on social media for the past 24 hours; a re-run of the same old, tired show.
There is no, and can be no, personal individual "right" to manufacture, sell, buy, or own mass-produced mechanical killing devices free from commercial regulation, any more than any other retail consumer product. There is, however, a "right" to imagine oneself doing all manner of heroic deeds with one's personal, private arsenal. Fighting or defending oneself against “tyrannical government” is only the most popular and ubiquitous of these fantasies, along with various home- and self-defense scenarios. Many of the latter are not entirely unrealistic, but that’s beside the point. Ask any opponent of gun control why (s)he’s opposed to it and chances are (s)he will, at some point, describe to you an imagined scenario involving his/her own personal heroism that gun control would supposedly prevent or prohibit him/her from living out.2 If these can’t rightly or fairly be called “personal hero-fantasies,” what, then, are they?
[2 — (S)He might also tell you that gun control “doesn’t work,” viz., that this or that hypothetical measure would surely not have prevented the latest mass-exercise of Second Amendment Freedoms, or that “criminals” will break the law anyway making gun control ineffectual, pointless, and unduly punitive. The idea that any law could guarantee with 100% certainty that bad things will never occur is an interesting one, but one must wonder why only laws and proposals relating to gun control and no other subject matter ought to be held to this unique standard.]
The real question, then, is not whether gun control interferes with the manufacture, sale, purchase, trade or ownership of high-priced store-bought mechanical death toys, because of course it does, nor whether such interference is constitutionally permissible, because of course it is. It’s whether gun control — in reality, or in the abstract — interferes with those fantasies, and with the fantasists’ potential for living out those fantasies. Apparently it does, which is why we can't have it. And since products can be controlled but fantasies can’t, we’re stuck with both the fantasies and the guns. I just wish we could be honest about both.