Gary Younge's Another Day in the Death of America
Gary Younge's Another Day in the Death of AmericaThe NRA defends the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Adopted in 1791, it states, “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 assumption that this relates to an individual’s rights is widespread but by no means uncontested. “The world of the Second Amendment is unrecognizable,” argues Michael Waldman in The Second Amendment: A Biography. “A world where every white American man served in the military for his entire adult life, where those citizen soldiers bought their own military weapons and stored them at home, and where the idea of a US Army would be enough to send patriots to grab their musket. When the militias evaporated, so did the original meaning of the Second Amendment […] Apocalyptic in tone, demagogic in content, hyperbolic in scale, the dystopian vision conjured by LaPierre was of a nation not only under attack but in decline. “Almost everywhere you look,” he said, “something has gone wrong. You feel it in your heart, you know it in your gut. Something has gone wrong. The core values we believe in, the things we care about most, are changing. Eroding.… It’s why more and more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition. Not to cause trouble, but because we sense that America is already in trouble.”