One irony of our spineless gun debate is the number of people who seem to believe that assault rifles are the backbone of the Second Amendment. If ever these weapons should be regulated or abolished, they believe, then it’s but a short step before the Second Amendment is ripped from the Bill of Rights.

In fact, assault rifles have as much in common with the spirit of the Second Amendment as child pornography has in common with the spirit of the First. The Second Amendment is based on a social contract that recognizes mutual need. Assault rifles are antisocial technologies pitched to consumers with the promise that they won’t need anyone.

And the consumers are buying, in the millions. The result is a phenomenon the founders could never have envisioned: the emergence of the one-man militia. No man is an island, perhaps, but with an AR-15 in his hand, one man can be an army.

A fear of standing armies lies at the root of the Second Amendment. A “well-regulated militia” is what the framers preferred. Far as we’ve fallen from their ideal, we can still summon it with a mental image: hands reaching for the rifle on the wall, neighbors emerging from their houses to join with other neighbors in facing a common foe.

The symbolism of the assault rifle, on the other hand, suggests a different ideal — what has become our reigning ideal: radical autonomy through technological enhancement. From the self-serve checkout to the self-published book, the premise is the same. The need you once had for another person can be transferred to a device under your own control. You yourself are the free press, the religion, the assembly — and the self-regulated militia.

As such, you have become something more than one citizen among many. You no longer need “the many.” This is hardly a new ambition. There have always been two divergent visions for America: one a society of equals with no kings, and the other an anarchic competition in which any person with enough money, muscle or firepower can behave like a king. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d have a monument beside the Lincoln Memorial for Al Capone.

Those of us who would like to see assault rifles banned or at least strictly regulated tend to see their proliferation as some kind of barbaric aberration, as out of place in a civilized country as the Coliseum would look in Central Park. Politically and socially, that sounds about right. In terms of our culture, however, these weapons are but a small, lethal piece of the larger project. Any change of heart capable of bringing about their abolition would require getting a new heart.

Easier, by far, to get a new gadget. I used to employ a typist in my work, but she went the way of the typewriter. My wife and I used to rent films from a store run by our neighbors; now we order them online. They come to us the old-fashioned way, by mail, but Randy, our postal carrier, drives under the shadow of a drone. He is starting to look dispensable. It’s how poor people look to urban developers, how workers look to employers with robots on the brain.

Or, to take a step much shorter than we care to admit, it’s how children sitting in a classroom or gay patrons dancing at a nightclub start to look to the troubled isolato in his virtual cocoon. The most misanthropic Neanderthal was never able to do what he can do, which is to live and brood for weeks on end without the tangible assistance of another human being. And to make a massacre all by himself.

There needn’t be an assault rifle on a subway car in order to see the conditions that make one thinkable. All you need to do is raise your eyes from your screen long enough to look around. Would you like to talk to any of these people? Would you care very much if the train operator were replaced by a droid? Wouldn’t it all be so much easier if you could hit “delete” and everyone else just disappeared?