The 2nd Amendment ensures that ultimate
power remains with the people and not with the state. All infringements of the
right to keep and bear arms are attempts to move power from the people to the state. We
must remember our history. Our nation’s birth certificate, The Declaration of
Independence, when referring to people and a tyrannical government, states that "it
is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." This great document
would have ended up on the scrap heap of history if our founders had not backed it up with
the barrel of a gun. The citizens of this new nation fought for freedom and won.
From experience, it was fundamental to the framers of the Constitution that a
government that did not fear its citizens was a government again bound for tyranny.
Therefore, they ensured that all power rested with "We the People" and not with
the government. They knew that power resided with those who held the strongest weapons.
Those weapons must never be taken from the people.
We have an innate, God given right, to protect ourselves. When something is flung at
your face, do you not react by defending yourself? If someone wants to hurt you or enslave
you, your right to protect yourself still exists. That right to protect yourself,
fundamentally from a tyrannical government, is the purpose of the 2nd Amendment.
We see repeatedly in history how disarming the citizen led to the deaths of
millions. In this century alone, in Cambodia, China, Guatemala, Turkey, Uganda,
the USSR, and Nazi Germany over fifty-five million people died at the hands of their own
governments after the government disarmed its people. Would disarming US Citizens
result in anything different?
To deny the right to bear arms is to say that the efforts of those that fought and died
to form this nation were in vain. I will vote to eliminate all gun regulation. The
price to do otherwise is too great.
