Like most conservatives who are staunchly for the Second Amendment, I enjoy shooting guns and own them for self-defense and pleasure. Owning a gun and knowing how to properly use it are both a right and a privilege — and a serious one at that.



Come and take it pic.twitter.com/OAnUS146c3 — Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) September 28, 2018



However, there’s an odd, growing trend among conservatives, particularly women, of posting photos of themselves with their guns (usually an AR-15 or the like) and with a revealing outfit in a sexy, flirtatious pose. This is absurd and needs to stop.





This young woman is an advocate of being able to carry legally on college campuses. I am too — that’s a worthy cause to enable young people at college to protect themselves. Still, she often takes her advocacy too far with tweets and photos of herself with her guns and in sexy poses while wearing revealing clothing.



Rifles and heels. My two favorite things 👠💎 pic.twitter.com/n9pQqI1AE4 — Kaitlin Bennett (@KaitMarieox) December 15, 2018



Look, in a way I get it: You’re in your 20s, and you still look hot. If you pose with a semi-automatic and you show off a great set of legs, there’s something titillating about the juxtaposition of the feminine and the traditionally masculine in one photo.

There’s just one problem here: Guns are not here for your titillation. The Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights is not here for your titillation. It is also certainly not what anyone who advocates for the right to bear arms in a serious fashion wants to rally behind either.

The Second Amendment ensured that we as citizens have a right to defend ourselves via militia against a totalitarian government. It also ensured the right, as District of Columbia v. Heller later found, to defend ourselves in our own home, among other things.

Defense against government is important. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion of District of Columbia v. Heller:



That history showed that the way tyrants had eliminated a militia consisting of all the able-bodied men was not by banning the militia but simply by taking away the people’s arms, enabling a select militia or standing army to suppress political opponents. ... During the 1788 ratification debates, the fear that the federal government would disarm the people in order to impose rule through a standing army or select militia was pervasive in Anti-federalist rhetoric.



However, as Scalia also wrote in Heller, the Second Amendment isn’t an allowance for a gun free-for-all: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

While for many owning and shooting a gun is fun, a flaunted part of their job, or maybe just a pastime, the Second Amendment as part of our nation’s founding documents was a hard-fought right. Citizens, like Heller himself, have helped us continue that fight and continue to win to keep that right.

Making guns appear like they have a sexual appeal is not only a poor interpretation of the Second Amendment, but it is just stupid. The people who have guns should treat them with the same amount of respect and care as our forefathers, who made sure we had the right to keep and bear them. Go ahead and take your gun to the range and practice, go ahead and keep a gun at home for self-defense.

But please, stop posting pictures of your half-naked self with a gun like you’re trying to make guns titillating again.

Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.