Indeed, a good read. Anyone who takes the “collective” view of the Second Amendment is not taking an honest look at what had just taken place in “the Colonies,” and it’s likely effect on the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. The new nation had just won a war for independence against an oppressive regime, a war that would have ended before it began but for the fact that most able-bodied men in the colonies had been allowed to “keep and bear arms.” What was in the Founding Fathers’ minds at that moment in history? Were they so sure this new “experiment” known as democracy would succeed, and that there would never again be a need for the average citizen to take up arms against the government? Or is it all the more likely that they realized that their fledgling nation’s government could, like so many others, undergo a metamorphosis into yet another in an endless succession of tyrannies? Which way would they hedge their bets, to eliminate the threat of revolt by stripping the means of resistance from the people, or to guarantee the peoples ability to defend themselves against repression?
When I took the oath of office upon my commissioning, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and defend it from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.”[b/] Who’s to say that domestic enemy couldn’t someday turn out to be “the Government”? I pray it never does, but as long as humans remain “human” that possibility, however remote, exists. I believe the framers of the Constitution believed it as well.
