porphyrogenitusHere’s another argument against this:
“Argument 2: 2nd amendment advocates claim the law is intended for people to resist a tyrannical government. As argued here, these people claim that the people have the right to use the same kind of weaponry as the government. But nowadays the government has vastly superior weapons, including tanks, missiles, airplanes, and nuclear bombs. Do we want to live in a world where citizens also have access to these kinds of weapons?”
which they’ll hate, hate, hate, and try to rule out-of-bounds, not because it’s a bad analogy but because it’s a good one:
When the 1st amendment was written, they had no concept of modern media and education. In today’s world government and their affiliates, including education and major media, have the big megaphones. They compel people daily to violate their consciences, thus rendering moot the free exercise clause. People’s livelihoods are threatened and even lost for expressing the wrong ideas in public. You think you can fight all that with a few liberty-oriented blogs and a facebook page? No, it’s time to treat the first amendment like the questioner wants the second to be treated: not to bother to even make the effort of repealing it explicitly, but just treat it in practice as a dead letter, let government tell us what the limits are; but keep the pretty paper the amendments are written on because it’s in that government’s interests – the only interests that functionally matter – to maintain the pretense that it is a constitutionally legitimate regime operating within the rules in the eyes of its subjects.”