As someone who covers Second Amendment issues a lot over at our sister site, Bearing Arms, I see a ton of people try to wage war in the gun debate with what amounts to trying to use a water pistol on Normandy Beach on D-Day.
And some people really wish they were that well-equipped for what they got themselves into.
See, a lot of people don't actually know anything about the Second Amendment beyond what they've been told by leftist commentators with an ax to grind against anything that could prevent them from enacting the totality of their socialist agenda.
But they think they know, often because they're "educated"--which really just means they learned how to regurgitate faculty-approved facts at a college, not that they actually know how to think or anything--and so they parrot talking points. Others think they're self-educated because they say the exact same things.
Sometimes, though, they think they're clever, and they post crap like this on X:
Fun Fact: The Word Heller Pretended Was There
— P a u l ◉ (@SkylineReport) December 2, 2025
The Second Amendment has exactly 27 words. Justice Scalia’s Heller opinion (2008) somehow hallucinated an entire “central component” — personal self-defense — that doesn’t appear anywhere in the text.
Seriously. Go look.
The… pic.twitter.com/JWytviL0Bu
The post continues:
The Framers wrote:
* “well regulated Militia”
* “security of a free State”
* “keep and bear Arms”And absolutely none of this:
* self-defense
* personal protection
* home defense
* hunting
Not even a polite hint.
Heller didn’t “interpret” the Second Amendment. It rewrote it, ripping out the stated purpose — state militias defending against federal overreach — and stuffing in a modern ideological fantasy the Founders never put on the page.
It’s the constitutional equivalent of reading the Preamble (“form a more perfect Union… insure domestic Tranquility…”) and declaring, “Clearly, the Founders were warning us about TikTok.”
Words matter. The Founders chose theirs carefully.
They feared standing armies, not burglars.
They wrote about militias, not vigilantism.
Yes, the Amendment protects the keeping of arms — but because citizens were expected to bear them in service to their state militias. Scalia flipped the logic upside down and called it history.
And America has been trapped in that fantasy ever since.
Note what phrases he omitted as being included in the Second Amendment. In particular, "the right of the people" and "shall not be infringed."
It doesn't matter why we want guns. It doesn't matter what lawful purpose we use them for, or if we use them at all; the right is one for the people and was not open for infringement.
Further, while none of those words he mentions as not existing in the Second Amendment are, in fact, there, the truth is that the Constitution has a lot of concepts that aren't explicitly spelled out.
For example, the words "right to privacy" do not exist anywhere in the text. It's implied via the Fourth Amendment, but it's not expressly there, just like "self-defense" isn't in the Second Amendment.
The "separation of church and state," which the left absolutely loves to invoke anytime anyone tries to do anything involving religion in any context, even remotely associated with the government, is from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote. It's nowhere in the First Amendment. The left has made hay of that for decades, even though the First Amendment just says that the government cannot establish a state religion. That's as close as it gets on the topic.
So yes, those particular words and phrases never appear in the Second Amendment's text, but Scalia didn't say they did. He never pretended the text said anything beyond what it did when he wrote the Heller decision.
But that doesn't mean the concept of self-defense isn't relevant. The entire point of the Second Amendment was to protect the nation from tyranny. Criminality is merely a kind of tyranny that doesn't involve governments. Self-defense is therefore implied, especially considering how widespread the ownership of guns for self-defense purposes was at the time of the nation's founding.
Indian attacks were still a thing, after all, and that's yet another reason why people owned guns beyond militia duty.
To say this is some fantasy because you want it to be, is so ridiculous that to actually buy that, you have to be so mentally disabled that you ride a short bus to work. Especially since "the people" means "the people" everywhere else they're mentioned in the Constitution, and nowhere is it taken to mean that it only matters if they're up for militia duty.
But then again, if they had enough brain cells to recognize this basic fact, they wouldn't be leftists.
