Heather Cox Richardson writes a valuable and informative history of the politics of guns in America. She makes clear that the current Republican interpretation of the Second Amendment is not rooted in American history.

Please open the link to see the footnotes.

She writes:

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our…