The Ballad of the Second Amendment

A free people's defense against government tyranny? A relic of the slave patrols? Or just a big bunch of political gobbledygook?

Lately Trump-GOP rightists have renewed the perennial fantasy that the founders wrote the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—I doubt I have to tell you what that amendment covers—as a way of giving the people a way of rising up against the U.S. government, should the government ever get out of hand and start doing things that the people deemed un…