The Second Amendment isn’t a particularly long amendment. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Now, say what you want about our gun rights, there’s nothing in there that reads like it only applies to a specific group of people. That’s because the term “people’s right” means it applies to all people.

Yes, the Founding Fathers may not have acted like all people were really people, but that’s now been addressed in the Constitution.

However, some people seem to believe that guns and gun rights are really only for white folks…and it’s not white gun owners who are saying that. It’s folks trying to paint gun owners as racist.

For many progressives, liberals and other Americans who are not part of the MAGAverse, TrumpWorld or America’s gun culture, Graham’s performance of gun-toting hyper masculinity was laughable. His comments about defending his family from “gangs” were also criticized as being especially ill-timed given the recent mass shooting events. But again, as is so many other instances, those outside of the right-wing echo chamber were not the audience for Graham’s performance.

The South Carolina senator was speaking to a right-wing culture, moral universe and imaginary where guns, whiteness and toxic masculinity are tightly if not immutably linked together. He was channeling the idea of the white American male as defender of his home and family — and of heterosexual white (right-wing) male power and privilege — against some type of “criminal” or “invader,” generally understood to be black or brown. This enemy to be defended against may be a “Muslim terrorist,” an “urban” black male or a “Latino gangbanger.” He may also be a member of “antifa,” the right wing’s current bogeyman.

Lindsey Graham’s assault rifle and others like it are also central to end-times survivalist dystopian fantasies of societal breakdown and failed government that involve “race war,” environmental collapse, another pandemic or other such disaster.

Except, Graham didn’t say any of that crap. It’s nowhere in anything anyone has said, only in what liberals and progressives desperately want to hear and call “dog whistles,” which are often hilarious because absolutely no one on this side thinks these things when they hear certain terms. Then again, you know what they say. “If you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.”

Further, it’s absolute nonsense.

First, blacks, Asians, and women represent a massively growing segment of the firearm market right now. Absolutely no one besides gun control advocates are upset by this, either.

See, this idea that guns are about hypermasculine white Republicans being able to shoot brown people is based on a myth, one anti-gun folks love to tell themselves about us. They can’t fathom why we’d oppose gun control, so they make up narratives to tell themselves so they don’t have to actually speak to us.

This is one of those things.

I promise you, while many of us ponder whether we’ll need to defend ourselves against criminals, the ethnicity of the criminal is never relevant. There are far too many white scumbags out there for any of us to try and play at a game like that anyway. Instead, we’re concerned with protecting our family. Period.

The ethnicity of the bad guy is irrelevant and that’s not just me talking. That’s based on legions of discussion with other Second Amendment supporters through the years. We simply don’t care.

The only one who cares is the author, all because he’s trying desperately to paint all of us with a very broad brush because heaven forbid people listen to us and think of us as rational human beings. It’s much better, in his mind, that we be thought of as racists, then we can be easily dismissed.

In the process, though, he’s invalidating the growing number of women, black, and Asian gun owners in this country who also want to protect themselves from what they fear and what they see in the news.