I alluded to this earlier, but it merits its own discussion: I am standing up for my right to not get shot. Sure, it is not expressly stated in the Bill of Rights that I have a right not to be the unwitting victim of someone who forgot to clear his chamber before carrying his gun in public, but I shall posit that I have the right nonetheless. Call it a penumbra right, or one of the rights guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment that the Supreme Court is too lazy to address.

Consider this: no one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully challenged a conviction for unlawful discharge of a firearm on Second Amendment grounds. Laws prohibiting homicide, several centuries of jurisprudence would suggest, trump any individual’s right to bear arms (whether you can keep your gun after a criminal conviction is a different question, and has been subject to much legal wrangling.) See, no one is seriously threatening to come and take your guns. It is both unconstitutional and ridiculously impractical. The NRA says that to get you to buy more guns. It’s not a conspiracy, because it’s really obvious what the NRA is doing.

Moving on to individual discussion about guns, if your first response to any critical commentary on guns is to loudly assert your Second Amendment rights, you sound like a jackass, and I no longer feel constrained by politeness to refrain from telling you that you sound like a jackass. I’m not saying you can’t own guns. I’m not even necessarily saying that you can’t carry your gun around. What I am saying is that you have no right to expect me to assume, on sight, that you are one of those “law-abiding” gun owners.

Someone writing under the name Liberal Librarian at The People’s View wrote a list of rights that we, as people who are capable of stopping bullets, ought to assert as forcefully as that percentage of gun owners (not all of them, so chill) who imagine that UN troops are coming for their guns any second.

Your “right to bear arms”…does not mean that I need to think, every time I get in my car to go shopping or to the movies or out to eat, what to do if a gunman decides that the place where I’m going to would be a good place to vent whatever frustrations he has by way of his arsenal.

Your “right to bear arms” should not mean that you have a right to amass an armory, which can fall into the hands of your disturbed child and used in a mass school shooting.

Your “right to bear arms” should not mean that any attempt to regulate arms sales and possession is instantly seen by the gun lobby as reason for a revolution.

Your “right to bear arms” should certainly not mean that you have a right to carry concealed weapons and pull them at the slightest altercation.

Your “right to bear arms” should not entitle you to owning assault weapons which are useful only in war.

Your “right to bear arms” should not trump my right not to be shot while going along my daily business.

Please, focus on what people are actually saying. Few if any people want to take your guns from you, but many of us are very concerned about where the bullets go after they leave the gun.

Photo credit: By Elendil004 [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0], via deviantART.