Originally Posted by D

I just posted something very similar in another thread, but it really applies here, too, so, pardon me repeating myself:

In the U.S., guns aren't only a tool designed to kill people, they're also a symbol of the citizen's power over his own government.

Part of the spirit behind the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the eyes of the founding fathers was to enable physical control of the country's citizen militia forces over the Federal government itself. Handguns might not have existed back then, but neither did ICBM's.

As Thomas Jefferson first said in our Declaration of Independence from Britain:

"WHEN, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands, which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's GOD entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation."

or, as he put more succinctly in a letter to James Madison:

"...a little rebellion now and then is a good thing..."

What's often unrealized by a lot of anti-gun peeps in the U.S. is that the Second Amendment was established to, essentially, ensure that the people retained the power to overthrow their government in the future.

While the American system, ideally, enables the citizenry to do so without the need for violence (for each new presidency/congress is, essentially, a peaceful overthrow of the previous government), the importance of the Second Amendment is still present as an enduring freedom to that end.



Don't blame the tools - blame the idiots using them.