The Inner Monologue

Americans love the Bill of Rights in the same way toddlers love the concept of “mine.” They clutch it, wave it around, and shout about it—without any measurable understanding of how it works, where it comes from, or who gets to decide what it means when the rubber meets the boot.

Take the Second Amendment. Please. Take it far away and examine it under glass.

Many Americans believe their right to keep and bear arms is some kind of natural phenomenon, like gravity or male-pattern baldness. It simply exists, they insist, independent of government, time, space, and consequences. This is adorable, but incorrect.

The right to keep and bear arms is not granted by a mountain, a deity, or a vibe. It is granted by the federal government, codified in a federal document, interpreted by federal courts, enforced (or ignored) by federal agents, and ultimately constrained by the federal monopoly on violence, which is the only monopoly Americans rarely complain about while actively funding it.

This leads us to a deeply uncomfortable—but perfectly logical—conclusion.

If the federal government grants the right, then the federal government interprets the right.
If the federal government interprets the right, then its agents enact that interpretation in real time.
And if its agents enact that interpretation in real time, then your understanding of the Second Amendment is largely theoretical and theirs is operational.

Which is to say: they win.

Whether a firearm constitutes “lawful bearing” or an “imminent threat” is not decided by pocket Constitutions, YouTube law degrees, or bumper stickers that say Come and Take It. It is decided, in the moment, by the federal agent whose pulse just spiked and whose training manual contains a flowchart that ends with “neutralize threat.”

This means that carrying a firearm in the presence of a federal agent is not an exercise of a right—it is a live-action interpretive dance in which only one participant is armed with qualified immunity.

From this, it follows—beautifully, absurdly, inevitably—that carrying a firearm in the presence of any federal agent is undertaken entirely at the risk of the American. Not because the right doesn’t exist, but because the right exists inside the system that reserves the authority to decide when it suddenly doesn’t.

This is not tyranny. This is paperwork.

Americans insist they have an absolute right to bear arms while simultaneously insisting that federal agents should be allowed to “use their judgment.” These two beliefs cannot coexist in the same habitat without one eating the other. Guess which one has teeth.

The Second Amendment does not say:

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, unless a federal agent feels weird about it.”

And yet—here we are.

The absurdity is not that the federal government might interpret your armed presence as a threat. The absurdity is believing that a right granted, defined, and enforced by the federal government somehow places you above the discretionary authority of the people holding the radios, the rifles, and the incident reports.

In conclusion, Americans absolutely understand their Bill of Rights.

They just understand it the way a medieval peasant understood divine protection: deeply, sincerely, and with no meaningful impact on what happens when the guards show up.