With good reason

In the discussion that occurs when a crime of such proportions happens that it merits the attention of the national media, the focus at some point becomes the tools used to commit the crime and the need to limit those tools to preclude future tragedies. The salient point that is rarely discussed is why we have these tools in the first place. While the cultural connection to our heritage of hunting, shooting sports and self-defense have their place, the reason we have enshrined the right to keep and bear arms is to defend ourselves from our own government, as explained in part by James Madison in Federalist 46. The premise of a militia is an armed populace of non-professional soldiers, supplying their own arms.

Although it could never happen here, in spite of the inconvenient truth of National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union, Turkey, China, Guatemala, Uganda, Cambodia, et al., the reason above all others is that only an armed populace can defy a standing military. If we will hold the citizens of any nation responsible for the actions of its government, duly elected or not, then so must we be held to that same standard. One truth that Mao Zedong grasped as he stated in his writing, “Problems of War and Strategy,” political power “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Any measure, however small, that erodes access to those tools of political power is an assault upon all of our freedoms.

Martin Reynolds, Edmond