The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Heller case tomorrow. (Permit me a minor digression here. The linked Kansas City Star article provides a pretty objective report on the case, outlining the various positions at stake here. The one exception to this that I noted is the following sentence: "Justices first must interpret the famously opaque Second Amendment." The only reason the Second Amendment could be considered opaque is because of the obfuscation thrown in front of it by the anti-civil rights crowd trying to disarm the public.) As a result, lots of folks are talking about gun rights and gun control right now, and I have a few thoughts of my own.

There are quite a few reasons why people want to interpret the Second Amendment in such a way as to make it meaningless. Many ordinary folks are just flat-out afraid of guns. They don't know anything about them, they've probably never seen one "in person," and many undoubtedly have never even touched one.

Others have some familiarity and even respect for guns, maybe even own a gun or two of their own (but only for hunting or some other sporting purpose), but they believe that some guns are just too dangerous to allow the common folk to own them, such as handguns and the mythical "assault weapon."

The most dangerous anti-gun rights people are the statists. These are the people who believe in the supremacy of government over the individual. They're afraid of the "unwashed masses" having guns, because that's the final backstop to preventing governmental tyranny. With nearly 300,000,000 privately owned guns in America, there's no way that these people can turn us into an oppressed society similar to those of recent memory: the Soviet Union, Nazy Germany and many, many other, smaller tinpot dictatorships that have plagued our world. To expand governmental control over the people beyond a certain point, they'll have to make sure we don't have access to our guns anymore.

I know, some folks regard the previous paragraph as paranoid and delusional, and I've now identified myself as a crackpot. I can't stop anyone from thinking so, but I can't ignore history. Those who believe "it can't happen here" are hiding their heads in the sand.

The only reason it can't happen here is because we won't let it. And keeping and bearing our guns are two of the primary factors in that effort.