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Do you mean "Once you have established that politicians and justices have been dishonestly passing unconstitutional laws", "Once you have established that doing so is legitimate", or are you conflating the two?
The former can be argued, but the latter is clearly false. You're essentially arguing that we shouldn't expect our government to be intellectually honest -- is this a bullet you will explicitly bite?
Absolutely, because almost no-one is intellectually honest in my experience let alone politicians.
But thats not my point, reading the 2A as written, causes issues for pretty much any government, so almost immediately it had to be ignored in certain circumstances. That would have been the case regardless of changing out which politicians were in charge. Its not about individuals it's about how society responds to necessary things even if the necessity is apparently illegal. We've (both left and right) accepted that the 2A does not allow guns in prison since it was written basically. We (generally) have accepted that the constitution can only work as written with onventing tests about how narrowly the government must override them, and only when it is in the public interest and so on. But it was accepted.
Letting people in prison have guns, renders prisons unworkable and we need prisons therefore either prison is an unwritten exception or criminals are an unwritten exception or something else is an unwritten exception.
And once you have accepted there is an unwritten exception it becomes an avenue for further unwritten exceptions that are also "necessary".
The fact that people behave poorly does not make the behavior good. If you take off the pressure to behave well, you get worse behavior, not better behavior.
And it actually is the point, since the rest of your argument rests on this idea that intellectual dishonesty is okay so long as enough people do it.
And this is a perfect example. Once you justified intellectual dishonesty, you allow yourself to start saying things like this in a way that conflates "intellectually dishonest people are going to claim this, but they're clearly wrong and behavior is deserving of shame" with "it's true".
I've already given you two reasons why this doesn't work.
The first, IMO, is that once due process has been followed and you have been considered to be a threat to "the people" to the extent that you need to be locked up and maybe executed, you are no longer part of the protected class "the people". This seems quite clear to me too, since you can't exercise any rights once you're dead.
The second is that even if you were able to find an infringement so slight that everyone agrees it "doesn't count", then there's no need to amend things because no one disagrees. The moment you have people pushing back saying "Actually, 'shall not be infringed' means 'shall not be infringed'", it's not true that everyone agrees and now intellectual honesty requires amending the constitution in order to do that infringement. This is how it works in every other instance. If someone says "Do not touch me", in unqualified language like that, then you don't get to push them and justify it by saying that you expect they would have been okay if you hugged them. If they say "Do not touch me means do not touch me", then that does not give you the right to hug them just because you can justify why you think they don't/shouldn't mean it in the absolute. It is as absolute as the person whose rights being infringed on insists on, no less.
The only way you can miss either of these problems, even before they're explained but certainly after, is by relying on the mistaken idea that intellectual dishonesty isn't intellectual dishonesty if it's common.
I'm not making a moral point. Intellectual dishonesty may be bad, but we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. If you're writing rules and you know most people are intellectually dishonest, then regardless of if you support their dishonesty or not, you should account for it.
And I think in some cases in making Constitutional amendments that was done better than others. Due process claims is a method of defining your way out of the problem. But if the problem was specifically addressed, you have closed one area of attack.
Intellectual dishonesty is human. We are writing rules for humans, therefore those rules will be subject to it. Whether you think that is great or terrible is unimportant. It is.
It may well be bad that people try to drive a bus through a hole that previous people thought should only allow a mouse through. Intellectual honesty can require whatever it likes. But if most people are not, then it doesn't matter.
The moral valence of peoples actions is not relevant when discussing how bureaucratic laws and rules can be used or misused, and how gaps can be exploited and used. It might be good to use the hole to ban personal nuclear weapons, it might be good to use the hole to disallow criminals to have guns in prison. It might be bad to try and restrict black people from owning guns, and it might be bad to prevent New Yorkers from owning guns.
But Morality is subjective, once you allow for the hole, you must expect people with different moral opinions than you to use it for things they also think are good.
And early on we accepted there were holes. If you can define criminals as not being the people then you can certainly define blacks as not being the people. If you can define arms to exclude nukes you can certainly define arms to exclude high capacity assault rifles. And indeed that is exactly what we saw happen.
I'm not being prescriptive, I'm being descriptive of what actually happened. Good or bad is just pushing the argument to the moral sphere where different morals will have different answers. Doesn't matter because people do have different moral compasses. If you allow x because you think y is bad you can't be surprised when people want to allow a because they think b is bad.
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