Two weeks after Parkland became the latest American city to watch its name become synonymous with the horrors of gun violence, the cottage industry of Second Amendment commentary that springs up after each one of these tragic episodes was in full swing. Among its more strident defenders, as usual, was Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano, who penned an op-ed outlining his preferred justification for the continued existence of this country’s two-hundred-plus-year-old right to bear arms: It preserves the “natural right” of self-defense.

Natural rights, explains Napolitano, are not granted by government—they are “claims and privileges that are attached to humanity as God’s gifts.” Or, as he put it in the Washington Times after the Pulse nightclub shooting: “We know from reason, human nature and history that the right to defend yourself is a natural instinct that is an extension of the right to self-preservation, which is itself derived from the right to live.”

This is not just a Fox News company line. It was a pillar of Justice Scalia's reasoning in District of Columbia v. Heller, a Supreme Court case holding that the right to keep a handgun in one’s home is not dependent on service in a “well regulated militia.” (Napolitano says that when he asked the late justice why he sometimes used the term “pre-political” instead of “natural,” he replied. “You and I know they mean the same thing, but ‘natural’ sounds too Catholic, and I am interpreting the Constitution, not Aquinas.”) To these men, the Second Amendment is kind of a formality, enshrining in the law a common-sense truism as a matter of linguistic convenience.

An important implication of this argument, says Napolitano, is that more Americans would be safer if only more Americans were self-reliant gun owners. “We all need to face a painful fact of life: The police make mistakes like the rest of us and simply cannot be everywhere when we need them,” he wrote after Parkland. “When government fails to recognize this and it disarms us in selected zones, we become helpless before our enemies.” But if the underlying purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable people to take responsibility for their own safety, one complication is that it does nothing to finance the exercise of that right. And owning a gun is expensive.

The Price of Being a Responsible Gun Owner

A gun is a gun, no matter who holds it. NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch is fond of making this point, arguing that firearms act as the “great equalizer,” even among historically marginalized groups. But these statements are aspirational, not descriptive. Gun ownership is less common among African-Americans and Hispanics than whites, and more common among wealthier Americans than poorer ones. The financial and bureaucratic barriers to gun ownership, explained one California police officer, tend to disadvantage the same people who would supposedly be most empowered by the availability of tools of self-defense. “People don't live in dangerous neighborhoods by choice—they often can't afford to live anywhere else,” he said, noting that the task of obtaining a concealed carry permit, which most states require their proverbial Self-Reliant Good Guys with Guns to have, can be a cost-prohibitive one. "Citizens who want to do everything right can’t afford to legally protect themselves.” The cultural proliferation of guns has transformed the “right” of self-defense into a luxury available only to those who can afford it.

The process of buying a gun is like buying a car from a really good salesperson: After you make up your mind to buy a gun, you will do your research, consider your needs, pore through reviews, ask friends for advice, and go for some test drives. Eventually, you will walk into a showroom intending to purchase a specific bundle of goods for what you hope is a fixed price. You will leave with a gun, but also with lots of other stuff—some of it mandatory, some of it optional, and none of it included in the amount you thought you would spend in the first place.