Aren’t American lives worth saving?

American exceptionalism? Absolutely. We are an exceptionally young and pioneering nation, and became a great power not from an old, homogeneous ethnic base but by welcoming (more or less) all comers.
Part of that pioneering sweep west across the continent was made at the point of a gun, and our gun culture was enshrined, unlike that of any other of the 195 countries in the world, in our Constitution through its Second Amendment.
The Second reads: “A well regulated militia being necessary t