If there’s no tragedy, international comparison, body count or collection of silent moments profound enough to inspire a reduction in U.S. gun violence, maybe a simple question can reframe the issue. It has been 225 years since adoption of the anachronistic Second Amendment. Isn’t it time we Americans decide, are we in or are we out? Do we believe in America or not?

That’s what the gun-control debate boils down to. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is an archaic fail-safe mechanism to allow Americans to use violence to overthrow the elected government. It’s an out-clause that amends the U.S. Constitution to say “ ... and if you don’t like this stuff, we’re OK with you taking up arms against us.”

No nation on Earth would accept this half-hearted commitment from new immigrants. It’s time to dump the Second Amendment and commit to being Americans.

Context is important. When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the bloody revolt against British rule was still fresh for its authors. Fear of centralized government divided the founders. Some demanded protection from that, which they believed the Second Amendment provides, before they would sign.

Its intent was to retain the right of the individual and individual states to take up arms against an unjust central government. It was written in to placate anti-Federalists whom, if not placated, would never have agreed to the Union. With European tyrants still fresh in their minds, anti-Federalists enshrined in the Constitution a guarantee that states and individuals could maintain their own individual militias, and retain and bear arms to defend themselves against a tyrannical central government. It’s not about the right to hunt or to protect your family and home.

As ratified by the States and authenticated by then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the Second Amendment states: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

As written, individuals seem to have unassailable rights to own any type of weapon they want and to use those weapons to defend themselves against what they consider to be the tyranny of King Obama and his successors. Agree or disagree, but no one side is going to talk the other side into accepting its point of view, no matter how many moments of silence are required.

Therefore, the path to changing American gun laws must go through the historic foundation of the Second Amendment, the bedrock argument for the status quo.

It’s complicated, frustrating and agonizing, but we’re not going to fix it just by calling gun-rights advocates “gun nuts” after every insane mass murder. They don’t think they are gun nuts, and they are not likely to be convinced they are gun nuts.

Fortunately, there is a mechanism for changing the Constitution. It’s time to repeal or amend the Second Amendment and commit to the United States of America. It is not a collection of nation-states that can each go their own way. This isn’t Game of Thrones, or Rambo.

The architects of the United States did a pretty good job designing a three-branch system of checks and balances against the abuse of power by any single branch, or even two branches. It has worked pretty well for 240 years.

In fact, the 26-word sentence inserted to comfort a handful of nervous founders in a very different time has never been needed. In the modern era, who is to say when it is needed? Do you get to take up arms because you don’t like Obamacare? An increase in postal rates? Inconvenient routing of an interstate highway?

It’s long past time for Americans to decide if it works as a union, or if the underlying faith in the federal government is so precarious that individual patriots must always be armed and ready to overthrow it. Is it the world’s greatest economic and military power, an engine of creativity and innovation, and an example of an imperfect but committed democracy? Or is it a collection of regional clans?

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We don’t live in 1770. As an American who believes American democracy works reasonably well — that we don’t need automatic weapons in our closets “just in case” — I ask my fellow Americans, are you in or are you out? Do you believe in the United States of America, and if you do, is a weekly body count of the innocent the America you want?