That’s one of many arguments, and it has modern evidence for its truth. You don’t even have to look at successful insurgencies the world over. Look at Egypt, just a few years ago, at the height of the so-called Arab Spring. Long guns are largely illegal in Egypt. Which neighborhoods of anti-government demonstrators were visited in the middle of the night by thugs and agents of the government to get disappeared? The unarmed ones, or the ones hat happened to have a few armed citizens?
Gun control advocates like to construct this bizarre strawman that “the right” is arguing that a person with a tacticool AR15 is going to stand up to tanks and helicopters and somehow stand toe-to-toe with a platoon of Marines with their well-rehearsed fire & maneuver. That’s not the point. The point is that a populace that has a significant percentage of people who are armed cant be intimidated by visits from the secret police.
They certainly couldn’t imagine e-publishing books, Amazon 2-day Prime delivery, the internet, presidents communicating with Twitter at 3 AM, mass produced paperback pulp fiction, movies, satellite phones, or any other staples of modern free speech.
But they did imagine that free communication would always be a key feature of a free society, and of course the 1st Amendment applies to all of those new technologies.
They also imagined that weapons would advance. Technology wasn’t static in the 1700s. Enormous advances in small arms were made. As sb247 noted, they lived in an era of privately owned warships and artillery. And indeed some of the first shots of the Revolutionary war were over the British marching on Concord to confiscate artillery. Of course the 2nd Amendment applies to AR15s.
You don’t want to take away everyone’s guns, but if someone whispered the right sweet words to you, you would? How can we believe you when you make that promise, when you can’t even
finish the same sentence without admitting you’d willingly do it.
And that’s the problem. You get a little anxious about an irrelevant personal risk that is so low as to be lost in the noise, and your first thought is to infringe my rights, put me at risk, and cut away a critical check and balance to government power.
That’s not rational, it’s cowardly. It’s the essence of Franklin’s contemptuous remark about trading essential liberty for temporary safety, and the people who deserve neither.
Some perspective -
70 years ago the world was at war facing an existential threat, and our own government confiscated property and put its own citizens (who were largely unarmed) in concentration camps. Meanwhile the people of England, being loyal subejects of the crown and something a little less than free citizens, who’d voluntarily surrendered personal weapons after WWI, were staring down the barrel of a German invasion.
150 years ago we faced another existential threat and fought a civil war over slavery.
Who knows what will happen 70 or 150 years from today? Are you really so eager to trade our descendants’ rights and final defense away, all for the irrational illusion of security from the risk of a mass shooting? A risk of a couple events per year that amount to a 1/2 day’s worth of traffic deaths?
I’m not.
