The individual right to keep and bear arms is a natural right of all free people. It doesn't depend on the existence of the small arms industry. When the US Constitution was written there was hardly even an industry; most firearms were craft built.

> When the US Constitution was written there was hardly even an industry; most firearms were craft built.

You mean at the dawn of the industrial revolution, before which, you know, everything was craft built?

Yes that's what I mean.

We live in the 21st century, not the 18th century. If liberty requires that access to guns be a universal and inalienable right, then the capacity to manufacture and provide guns must scale with the population, and a small arms manufacturing infrastructure is necessary now to supply 300 million Americans with the access to firearms that the Constitution deems necessary for the US to remain a free state. Otherwise liberty diminishes because fewer guns wind up in fewer hands.

The Second Amendment does very much depend on the existence that industry, because if the government were to allow small arms manufacturing to fail, it would be de facto abridging the people's right to keep and bear arms. It's the only industry that has to exist in the US, by fiat.

If what you're saying were true, it would mean that manufacturing guns and/or ammunition for anything other than personal use could be made illegal without running afoul of the 2nd Amendment. Which is absurd.

Apparently, this can be pursued at the State level, so it may not be unconstitutional.

https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/HD4192/Cosponsor

This entire thread is why gun control constantly keeps existing as an issue, you two people who should be political allies are now splitting hairs over relatively minor issues compared to the cost of healthcare and wage stagnation

>You just don't have the same intersection of identity politics, culture and even religion with any other industry

I think this kind of monolithic homogenous group is fiction. I hear the same thing from other people about tech. Both sentiments lack a nuanced perspective.

Guns are almost a drug to the fading significance (psychologically, economically, politically) of the middle class white male. It's phallic, it makes you feel powerful and safe, it goes boom, and it is intimately tied to the mythos of the United States of America (well, and the Confederate States of America).

The amount of guns purchased by "gun nuts" reminds me of the stats on alcohol consumption: something like 80% of alcohol is consumed by alcoholics.

So you can mobilize a very rabid base politically.

Also, the gun manufacturers are tied in with the military and the diplomatic powers that be of the US (aka THE power brokers of the US government and the world).