These same individuals you speak of believe in a “living Constitution” which is a “dead Constitution.” I have no doubt they also believe the 2nd Amendment doesn't unequivocally state “we have the right to bear arms (period).” But it does state just that.
People who attempt to pervert the U.S. Constitution, are the same individuals who wish to destroy the United States. Unfortunately, it would appear as though they are gaining ground.
I think we are missing each other here.
The constitution is a framework for the law, it is not the law itself, instead it is more the constraints to what the law can be. Unless a particular part of the constitution has an enabling law created for it by congress, it sits idle.
The constitution contains *no* laws, as such. It does not designate who will enforce the law, what the penalties are for breaking the law, or who will execute those penalties.
Here is why the founding fathers set things up this way.
1) In Europe, the nobility said it was the nobility because God said they were nobility. In addition, because they were appointed by God, the laws they passed were in effect religious laws as well. If you break the king’s law, you have also offended God by doing so.
So the founding fathers made it abundantly clear that, while they respected God, God did not write our laws. They were written by men, and for men, and thus could be changed by men without offending God.
2) The founding fathers also were well aware that as soon as the ink on the written law had dried, everyone will try to evade it and avoid it. They should know, because colonial Americans were expert at evading and avoiding British law. We were smugglers and miscreants and proud of avoiding the Crown’s tax man.
This meant there had to be a standing body, a congress, to keep changing and adapting the law to prevent such chaos. Yet they also knew that this process could easily become corrupt, so with the constitution, they created a mechanism to control it.
For every government body, there had to be two other bodies with conflicting interests. The end result is that they balance each other and prevent any given body from becoming too powerful.
This crops up all over the place in the constitution. The balance between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The balance between the national government, the state governments, and the people. “The People’s House”, elected democratically, the senate appointed by the states, and the president, elected by the electoral college.
And the House is based on population, favoring the more populous states, the senate with just two senators for each state, favoring the less populous states. And the president got to appoint federal judges, but they, along with his cabinet, had to be approved by the senate, and thus the states.
All in all, the constitution was a masterful contraption, in which laws could be made, but only after passing through a gauntlet of competing forces any of which could kill it. So more than the “law of the land”, it is the “anti-law of the land”. With a Bill of Rights to doubly say to the government, “And ESPECIALLY keep your grubby mitts off these things.”
A long time ago I reached the conclusion that the founding fathers did miss one thing in the constitution. It needs a permanent pruning mechanism to reduce overgrowth.