Nonexistent Targets

I have a very mixed history when it comes to guns. When I was 12, my step-father took my step-brother and I shooting. We were after rabbits with small gauge shotguns. I couldn't shoot. Later, in the Navy, I qualified with the .45 and the M-16. After getting out of the service, I had friends with large gun collections and often went to the range with them and subsequently fell in love with the Sig Sauer 226. A fine handgun.

Although I consider myself a Constitutionalist, I'm not a person who believes that the document is always right for our times. In fact, many of the things written in both the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights just doesn't apply in the same way it did 200 years and a few hundred million people ago.

To me, it seems that the backbone of the pro-gun argument is that it's a Constitutional right and that it's there to prevent us from being enthralled by a tyrannical government. I buy that it's a right as laid down by our Founding Fathers. I'm not one of those people that subscribes to the definition of the 2nd Amendment as something that was only meant to apply to militias. It makes sense to me that after the birth of our nation, a fear of an oppressive government was a reasonable one and that letting the citizens be armed was a great way to keep elected officials in check.

However, it's 200 years later. We are a country of hundreds of millions and the type of despotism seen in the 18th century just wouldn't happen here in this country today. Why? Well, to be blunt, there's just too much money to be lost. The system as it stands, highly corrupted and undermined, yet still on it's face, a legitimate democratic republic, keeps the money flowing in all of the right directions.

While it's theoretically possible a group of citizens could get together with their pitchforks and shotguns and head toward Capitol Hill, can you imagine how that would actually play out? It would never even get to that stage in the first place. Each of the 'troublemakers' would be discredited personally or publicly well in advance and if not, any form of organized rebellion would be labeled as 'terrorism' long before they got to the physical violence stage.

Soldiers won't be knocking down your door and kicking you off your property. You are too valuable as a consumer, as a buyer of things, as a worker/purchaser drone. Go ahead and have your guns. There's nothing really to shoot at any longer, accept each other.