The reason for the Second Amendment

National Review has an excellent article by Charles Cooke titled 'Why Would Anyone Want A Firearm?'  I know it's preaching to the choir as far as most of my readers are concerned, but it contains many useful points for those times when you may run into an anti-gunner.  Here's a brief excerpt to illustrate.

In most of the world’s countries, firearms are regulated in much the same way as are, say, cars, radios, and lawnmowers: as everyday tools whose utility can be evaluated without prejudice. In the United States, by contrast, the government’s hands are tied tight. To those who are unfamiliar with the contours of Anglo-American history, this can be understandably confusing. “Why,” we often hear it asked, “would the architects of the Constitution put a public policy question into the national charter? Do we really have to stick with a regulatory scheme that originated before the invention of the light bulb?”

The answer to this question is a simple one: “Yes.” Why? Because, our contemporary rhetorical habits notwithstanding, the right to keep and bear arms is not so much a right in and of itself as an auxiliary mechanism that protects the real unalienable right underneath: that of self-defense. By placing a prohibition on strict gun control into the Constitution, the Founders did not accidentally insert a matter of quotidian rulemaking into a statement of foundational law; rather, they sought to secure a fundamental liberty whose explicit recognition was the price of the state’s construction. To understand this, I’d venture, is to understand immediately why the people of these United States remain so doggedly attached to their weapons. At bottom, the salient question during any gun-control debate is less “Do you think people should be allowed to have rifles?” and more “Do you think you should be permitted to take care of your own security?”

A five-foot-tall, 110-pound woman is in a certain sense “armed” if she has a kitchen knife or a baseball bat at her disposal. But if the six-foot-four, 250-pound man who has broken into her apartment has one, too, she is not likely to overwhelm him. If that same woman has a nine-millimeter Glock, however? Well, then there is a good chance of her walking out unharmed.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.  It won't do anything to change the minds of those who are blindly, irrationally, emotionally convinced that guns are a sign of Satan and are therefore to be banned and/or destroyed and/or both.  However, nothing will get through to such people.  These arguments will help with those who are open to logic and reason.  There aren't enough of them, but hey, we'll have to take what we can get.

I've often used the example of the disabled and/or handicapped shooters I've trained when talking with anti-gunners.  It's a lot of fun to see them fulminate that I'm 'irresponsible' for arming someone in a wheelchair.  "What if they fall out and the gun goes off?"  Well, that's why they use holsters, just as a more able-bodied person uses a holster to protect the firearm and stop it going off if he should fall.  As for at least three of my students being alive today because they used their firearms the hard way to defend themselves . . . the moral dilemma in an anti-gunner's brain is delicious to behold.  Part of their mind is saying, "But guns are eeeee-vil!" and another part is saying, "I daren't admit that in this case, a gun was a useful tool, because that'll create an exception to the norm I'm trying to argue!"  I've actually challenged some of them to admit that in those three cases, without a gun, the victim of the assault would have been much worse off;  yet they've refused to do so.  They literally could not bring themselves to acknowledge the facts, because to do so would be to undermine their world view.

I'd hate to have to live in their minds.  They must be awfully convoluted, confused, nasty places.

Peter