America is looking old.

In 1991, Supreme Court Judge Warren Burger called the American gun lobby’s interpretation of  the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – the right to have and bear arms – “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Burger – and others – pointed out that the rights it conferred made sense in the context of the then necessary existence of state militias to keep the peace.

The fraud has been the gun lobby’s successful reworking of a pragmatic, late 18th-century decision into a general and pretty-much unfettered right for any US citizen who isn’t chained up in a padded cell to carry just about any lethal weapon as a piece of arm candy in the early 21st.

I think that is a just criticism of the NRA’s stance.

It also raises something else:

It’s worth recalling that, while the founding of the USA at the end of the 18th century was a revolutionary novelty – a New World indeed – it’s in fact the oldest and in many ways the most antiquated of all constitutional states apart, I believe, from San Marino.

I wonder whether the reverence which US citizens give to their Constitution may actually hinder America’s development, whereas many older European nations, bloodied from wars and ideological strife, have had to re-imagine and even reconstitute themselves from time to time, which has encouraged a necessary pragmatism.

Perhaps this may lie behind some of the US’s present dysfunctions?

In short, has the USA become too old for its own good?