The government cannot take away our guns. This is not to say it
hasn’t tried by means of several thousand laws concerning gun ownership,
the right to carry a concealed weapon, and the demand that we undergo
background checks to own one.
What I mean is that the act of trying to take our guns would
be futile and, were it attempted, would result in an all-out
insurrection.
From well before the nation’s independence, won by gun owning
militias and a standing army, Americans have always been armed. In the
early years of the nation’s history you surely were not going to put
meat on the table without one.
Our Founding Fathers were unanimous in their belief that Americans
should have the right to bear arms and it is no accident that it is the
Second Amendment that guarantees the rights expressed in the First.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of
arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep
and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against
tyranny in government.”
One of the greatest tyrannies, one well known in nations where
tyranny is “the law of the land”, is to deprive citizens of gun
ownership. It is instructive that the sales of firearms have increased
dramatically since Obama was first elected President in 2008. A November
9th CNN news article following his reelection began by noting “Gun
sales are up in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection on Tuesday, driven
by fears of tighter regulations under a Democratic president,
especially for firearms that might be classified as assault weapons.”