A decidedly too long comment to a friends blog... :)

I think there is one thing about your blog that might be a little misunderstood about our founding fathers. Though they understood the problem with corrupt government... they also understand the idea of mob mentality (the slogan coined since the writing of our constitution and amendments). The very idea of the senate protects us from the majority taking over. Our bureaucratic government moves slowly because of it. In classical political philosophy (where we got much of our founding ideas from) a democratic government was coined as bad (and ranked along side oligarchy and tyranny) because it put too much power into the hands of the majority, which was considered to be unaware of their actions and how it may effect other classes and other forms of society. This was kind of proved true when you examine the prohibition era. The mob spoke and won... and then look what happened.
Any way... back to what I was saying. It is because of this our founding fathers built also built protections for itself. We are not just a democratic government... but we also have forms of a monarchy(President) and a aristocracy(congress) built into our very foundation.

Moving back to main point... after a deal of history, It is easy for someone to say that they have the right to own a gun and use it when the time arises... and namely when their government is not protecting them. However, this is exactly when we should examine the groups of people that might abuse this type of system. Lets say that every gay American got up and said "America is not treating me like a human and giving me my right of free speech and expression". In this case, they might justify to themselves why they need to hold a violent protest trying to overrun the government because it has become "corrupted" with evangelical Christians. I think that in this case you might see the importance of a slight control over the use of guns. I definitely do not like the idea of people just owning a gun without first being taught how to use it; maybe even with a personality test to accompany it.
Most importantly, I have no idea how it should be taken care of. I just know that though we have a right to protect ourselves from outside forces, as well as inside, it is also important to realize that I might need protection from my bi-polar neighbor... and that protection might just be not allowing them to have a gun at all.

And to tie in all of my history, I don't really believe that our founding fathers had the idea that the right to bare arms was solely for our protection from corruption... because they obviously realized that corruption occur in the hands of the people, as well. I mean, we couldn't even vote for our senators until the late 1800s. We are still not really voting for president, our electorial system takes care of that. And, more specifically, our amendments were added after our constitution as a way to appease the masses (or states needed to join).

I think this was a bit ranty. I didn't realize that I learned that much from my political philosophy classes. But, I guess I did.

Adiue