ArcaMax

We have been told, for decades now, that dead children are the price of freedom. School shootings are tragic, yes, but unavoidable. The Second Amendment is sacred, and any attempt to regulate guns is tyranny.

So when a man was shot and killed in Minnesota while legally carrying a firearm, not threatening anyone, not firing, not even holding it, you would expect the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment to erupt.

Instead, there is silence.

Not a peep from the militia cosplayers. No righteous fury from the open-carry crowd. No thunderous defense of a man who was doing exactly what they claim every American has the right to do.

The myth of the armed good guy has always depended on fantasy, that guns make chaos orderly, that violence becomes justice if the right person holds the weapon. But reality keeps shattering that story.

Here is what actually happened: A man with a legal permit, exercising his constitutional right, was tackled, disarmed, and then shot multiple times by federal agents. Video shows his gun was removed before shots were fired. He was not brandishing it or threatening anyone. He was not attacking; he was filming.

If carrying a gun is enough to justify death, then the Second Amendment is no longer a right.

And yet, the people who scream the loudest about government tyranny have nothing to say. The same people who fantasize about standing up to federal overreach have vanished at the precise moment federal power killed a citizen exercising a constitutional right.

This is the tell.

We have seen this movement erupt before. When Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15 and killed two people, he was transformed into a cause. He was fundraised for, defended relentlessly, and held up as proof that armed citizens are the last line of order in a chaotic world. The weapon was the point, and the violence was excused. The narrative was protected at all costs.

But when a man lawfully carrying a firearm is tackled, disarmed, and shot anyway, there is no mobilization from the same crowd. The difference is not the gun. It is who the gun is allowed to protect.

Because the gun-rights movement has never actually been about freedom. It is about hierarchy and about who gets to feel powerful and in charge. It is about whose fear counts, and whose death does not.

Dead children are acceptable collateral. Dead immigrants are invisible. Dead Black and brown men are routine. And now, apparently, dead armed citizens are still not enough to stir outrage unless they fit the right political story.

We have accepted classrooms as killing fields in order to preserve a fantasy of armed safety. We have normalized the slaughter of children in exchange for a promise that guns make us free.

But when an armed man is executed anyway, when the fantasy collapses, there is no reckoning and no apologies. We will get the same empty slogans, dusted off and repeated, while the body count grows.

The Second Amendment was never supposed to mean that children die in classrooms and citizens die on sidewalks. If the right to bear arms does not even protect the people who bear them, then we need to stop pretending this is about freedom. It is about who we are willing to sacrifice and how many bodies it takes before we finally admit the cost.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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