Bearing arms

The men who founded our nation understood that government was necessary to preserve the people's freedoms. But they also knew that government agents could not always be trusted to use their authority justly, and that government remains the single greatest threat to the rights and liberties of the people.

America's Founding Fathers knew that freedom required that the people always retain the ability to take government out of the hands of abusive officials, "to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security." This was far from just some lofty theory to the Founders. They had witnessed oppressive government firsthand and had seen this principle unfold in dramatic practice as thousands of armed citizens took up their muskets and drove the king's soldiers — their government's soldiers — back to Boston on April 19, 1775. The United States was born out of the fight against tyranny.

Most important, the Framers remembered this when they created a new Constitution. To ensure that government remains in the hands of the people, the Second Amendment guaranteed that the citizen militia would remain sacrosanct.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is the least understood of all rights mentioned in the Constitution. Few today have any idea of the true meaning and intent of this provision, and most people are more likely to deride this right either as an archaic and unnecessary remnant of an embarrassing past, or at best merely some benign assurance that "sportsmen" will be able to go hunting. Neither is true.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an important and integral part of what it means to be an American. In fact, it could be said to represent the most important and integral part of being an American...

If the average person today wonders about his relationship to his government, the Second Amendment provides ample guidance. It represents the ideal of American political and social life: the individual, self-governing, self-motivated, self-respecting, dignified, free citizen — who takes these virtues so seriously that he will maintain the personal power to back them up.

Amen.

While both ancient Rome and the British Parliament paid statutory lip service to the value of being armed, only in the United States was being armed recognized as an inviolable right protected by the Constitution. What started with gunfire at Lexington and Concord ended with the words of Tench Coxe, a friend of James Madison: "Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American. . . . [The] unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."

Never heard of the William Tell society I guess. The Swiss have long had a very similar, but more widespread, "gun culture" and "cross bow culture" before that.

It's been said that Switzerland doesn't *have* and army, it *is* an Army.

In county that shouldn't even exist, according to Michael Savage at least, since it lacks a common language, or did until quite modern times, when pretty much everyone speaks a couple of the four "official" languages, plus English. It does not lack a common culture however, nor does it lack a very strong commitment to protecting it's borders, and protecting it's people. One example is the requirement that all buildings over a certain size must have a fallout shelter. The requirement that bridges have a built in chamber for a destruction charge, and so forth.

Our original, 1792, militia system was patterned after that of the Swiss. They kept it up, we did not, sad to say. We neither wanted to pay taxes to support a standing army, (not that we trusted one either) nor wanted to "sacrifice" the time necessary for militia training. Sad really.

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