[xzins]

This is such a good article. Napolitano could be politically correct and fudge things to say machine guns, tanks, etc., were no way intended to be protected by the 2d amendment. From the article,

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties, they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.

The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty

If Washington and Jefferson had been limited to bows and arrows and had to register even those, Napolitano is correct, the Revolution would never have been won.

[painter]

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government.

Actually most colonists had better weapons. The redcoats used I think about75 calibre smooth bore Brown Bess with very poor accuracy. While most colonists had rifles that could shoot accuratly out to 200 plus yards.

[jazusamo]

A very powerful piece by Napolitano, he gets to the meat of the second and pulls no punches.