What’s the need for scare quotes around “intellectual?” The founding fathers were anti gun-control “intellectuals”: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp (“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.”).

But it might be time to acknowledge that the “Americans” the founders were talking about are a dead people that no longer exist. After all, more households in the 1950s had guns than today, but mass shootings were unheard of. Society is very different today and maybe that makes the Constitution obsolete. As James Madison wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Maybe we’re no longer such people and can no longer be trusted with the responsibilities the Constitution requires of us. In that case gun control makes total sense.