As an educator, I endure the trauma of lockdown drills with my students every month. I carry a bleed kit and a tourniquet—tools no teacher should ever need in a school but which have become as common as textbooks. Only in America would a teacher say this. No other advanced nation has normalized the ritual of children rehearsing their own survival or demanded that educators double as battlefield medics. 

      This grim reality is not an accident of fate—it is the direct consequence of policies that allow the easy accessibility of powerful firearms and the refusal of lawmakers to prioritize children’s lives over the profits of the gun lobby.

      From Sandy Hook to Parkland, from Uvalde to countless other devastated communities, we have watched children slaughtered in the very spaces meant to nurture and protect them. And what has been the response? Thoughts. Prayers. A brief performance of mourning, followed by swift obstruction of meaningful reform.

      Meanwhile, the epidemic worsens. According to the CDC, firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers—surpassing car accidents and cancer. Yet defenders of the Second Amendment insist this carnage is the unavoidable price of liberty. History and law tell a different story: the Second Amendment, as currently interpreted, is an anachronism manipulated into a shield for the gun lobby rather than a safeguard of democracy. Pro-gun lawmakers weaponize it as a political bludgeon, securing campaign cash and extremist credibility while leaving children defenseless in schools, playgrounds, churches, and neighborhoods.

      The Founder’s intent is clear: “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 Founders wrote this in the shadow of tyranny and invasion, when militias were needed in a nation without a standing army. Constitutional scholar Saul Cornell notes that “the original meaning of the Second Amendment was to protect the collective right of the people to keep and bear arms for the common defense.”

      James Madison in Federalist 46 argued that militias—not private arsenals—were the bulwark against authoritarian rule, stressing that Americans would be armed only “with the advantage of being armed” under the authority of state governments. George Washington insisted militias must operate with “discipline and subordination”—directly at odds with today’s fantasy of unregulated stockpiles. Thomas Jefferson, often misquoted by gun absolutists, warned against leaving society bound by “barbarous ancestors” and insisted laws “must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

      Crucially, the Founders never intended unrestricted gun ownership. Eighteenth-century laws required white men to serve in militias but simultaneously disarmed Black and Indigenous people. In fact, militias were often more effective as domestic police forces, especially in controlling enslaved populations, than as defenses against foreign enemies. The Second Amendment was never colorblind; it was a tool to maintain white supremacy.

      Regulation has always been apart of the deal. Even the NRA once supported strict gun laws. The Mulford Act of 1967—signed by Ronald Reagan and backed by the NRA—restricted open carry in California in direct response to armed Black Panthers asserting their rights. The 1968 Gun Control Act, also supported by the NRA, restricted mail-order gun sales and barred sales to felons, the mentally ill, and drug users.

      The popular claim that the Second Amendment protects private militias is both ahistorical and dangerous. As legal scholar Mary McCord demonstrates, “a well regulated militia” always meant forces organized and overseen by government authority. The Constitution gave Congress power to “call forth, organize, and discipline” militias—leaving no space for self-appointed vigilante armies. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this view, from Presser v. Illinois (1886) to Heller itself, which still rejected protections for private paramilitary groups.

      The events of January 6, 2021, proved the dangers of ignoring this history. Armed private militias, wrongly claiming constitutional legitimacy, stormed the Capitol to overturn an election. The Second Amendment was never meant to enable insurrection; it was meant to ensure public order under civilian authority.

      For most of U.S. history, courts understood the Second Amendment as tied to militia service. In United States v. Miller(1939), the Court upheld restrictions on sawed-off shotguns, declaring the amendment did not guarantee the right to keep weapons without a “reasonable relationship” to militia use. Only with District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) did a narrow 5–4 majority led by Justice Scalia transform the amendment into an individual right of self-defense. Justice John Paul Stevens warned in dissent that this “dramatic upheaval” would fuel more deaths. He was right: since Heller, gun ownership and gun deaths have skyrocketed.

      The U.S. has 120 guns per 100 people—more than double the next closest nation, Yemen. Countries with strict gun laws, like Japan and the U.K., have firearm death rates that come nowhere close to ours. Even within America, states with stronger gun laws consistently report fewer gun deaths. If “more guns” meant more safety, the United States would be the safest country in the world. Instead, it is the most violent.

      Freedom is not the right to outgun your neighbors. Freedom is the right to live without fear of being shot in a school, church, grocery store, or movie theater. Today, the Second Amendment does not secure freedom—it undermines it. In practice, it has become America’s deadliest loophole.

      Fatalism is not an option. The Constitution can be amended, laws can be reinterpreted, and courts can evolve. Once-unthinkable reforms—abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights—became inevitable when people demanded them. Guns kill more Americans every year than car accidents, terrorism, or war. The Second Amendment, once intended as a guardrail against tyranny, is now a suicide pact.

      Congress must act. We need universal background checks, a national gun registry, mandatory licensing and training, safe storage laws, and bans on military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines. Guns should be regulated like cars—requiring registration, insurance, and proof of competence. States and Congress can push legislation that tests the limits of Heller and forces the Court to confront its deadly error.

      But this is more than policy. It is moral clarity. If lawmakers cannot summon the courage to protect children from the nation’s leading killer, they cannot credibly call themselves pro-life, pro-family, or pro-child. To value guns more than lives, ideology more than compassion, and lobbyists more than grieving parents is to abandon America’s future.

      Unlike most workers, when I go to my job, I must be prepared to fight off armed intruders and die protecting my students, on five-figure salary. When I hug my kids off to school it’s with the understanding of the threat face. That is what the Second Amendment means in practice today. And until we act—until we close this loophole—it will continue to mean death for children, teachers, and communities across this nation. If we were truly committed to children, we would prioritize life over lobbyists. We would listen to the parents who bury their children too soon. We would recognize that freedom without safety is no freedom at all. 

Matthew Edwards

Peachtree City