Guns are the crack of the partisan hacks. Courage is an imaginary passion for them and thus the gun huggers cling to the source of their only strength, an empty bravado. They are like a child with its blankee who cries when separated. Drugs, even when they are hard metal talismans of courage are not something the frightened can part with. They have come to represent freedom for the unfree, teetered as they are to the gun lobby and the NRA, and a misrepresentation of the 2nd. They need their fix and their fix is an object of imaginary security, an object that gives meaning to a senselessness that only programmed Americans can believe is real.
"In 1991, Warren E. Burger, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, was interviewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the meaning of the Second Amendment's "right to keep and bear arms." Burger answered that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud--I repeat the word 'fraud'--on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." In a speech in 1992, Burger declared that "the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all. "In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was "to ensure that the 'state armies'--'the militia'--would be maintained for the defense of the state."