“Why are you carrying a gun?”

The reply to this question: “I carry a gun because it is my constitutional right to do so,” is not to proffer a compelling or persuasive or even honest answer as to precisely why one in fact believes it is necessary to carry a gun. One may of course supply any number of reasons (reasons ranging from the incoherent or false to the sensible and true, or the plausible to sound and so forth) to explain why one is carrying a gun, the putative constitutional right only accounting for the fact that one is carrying a gun is not a presumptive reason for a criminal offense (or that one is abiding by the law) as well as the fact that the sundry reasons one might proffer by way of an explanation are backed by an (alleged) constitutional liberty (one I happen to think does not does or should not exist, but that is beside the point for now). The knowledge of this alleged right often works in subsidiary conjunction with the actual reason(s) one has for carrying a gun. Thus, one is legally permitted, according to the prevailing interpretation of the first and second clauses of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (the axiomatic logic of which begins by stating the necessity of a ‘well-regulated Militia’ for ‘the security of a free State’), to carry a gun, but to invoke that as a necessary and sufficient reason for why one is carrying a gun is to avoid providing even a plausible or truthful reason for doing so, thus one is in fact not answering the question, “Why are you carrying a gun?” To properly answer the question one has to provide a minimal practical reason for one’s decision to exercise this particular (putative) constitutional liberty.