Sure, but "not doing anything to improve the state of 2A" is not the same as "fighting to impose a degraded view of 2A". The ACLU has nothing to gain by promot

Sure, but "not doing anything to improve the state of 2A" is not the same as "fighting to impose a degraded view of 2A". The ACLU has nothing to gain by promoting any particular 2A view, because that's the only right that's not universally a political sinkhole. The inconvenient truth is that all civil rights (that aren't gun rights) have opposition nearly everywhere in America. The only difference is incidentals- if you're in coastal California or urban New England, your subculture wants "hate speech" banned; whereas Arkansas has a more traditional version of obscenity (depictions of sex and promotion of other vices) it wants to eliminate. So civil rights (in the traditional sense) has no defenders in legislature or society at large. Gun rights, on the other hand, still do in many areas of the country (coastal California and urban New England are the two big exceptions, of course), and as such I can't fault the ACLU's 'default' stance on a right that's not universally contested.