All those for or against political polls, might I remind you that the United States is not a pure democracy (one person, one vote)? If we wanted to be a pure democracy, we’d have to do away with our tricameral governance: the US Senate does not represent individuals but individual states. The US Supreme court can throw out popular laws if they are unconstitutional. And the US President becomes “dictator” during a state of congressionally declared war.

So perhaps we should ask why our founding fathers thought it more advantageous to live in a federalist state than a pure democracy.
I believe the motivating core of this examination is the idea that not all of us can be experts on the US Constitution, so we must depend on the interpretation of constitutional lawyers/statesmen rather than the generally non-expert populace.

Unfortunately, many today think experts are the problem, and we only need to make emotional noise out of our mouths to sustain our union in this age of speculation.

Remember the movie, I ROBOT, where Will Smith was encouraged to ask the right questions to solve his mentor’s murder? We need to ask the right questions if we want to arrive at any particular answers. The issue of gun control, for example—we think the only options are either the regulation of gun access to the people who use them, or the elimination of guns altogether.
We invoke the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, but what was the motivation for the idea of a citizen militia? Are we still in danger of being enslaved by our own government? In contemporary times, how would that militia work, and would bearing arms stop a headstrong government from outwitting us, from dominating us with its more sophisticated armaments?

Even though Texas still has the right to secede from the Union, its armed citizens probably could not bring succession about (and that might be the best case scenario where numbers of the disaffected are large, and they have constitutional law on their side). Citizens have the right to bear arms in their own defense, but how might that work?

We see how the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms treats the resistance of a few disgruntled citizens. How many of us must come together in our own defense against the intrusiveness of government for the bearing of firearms to work? Just seems like changing government, or defending ourselves against government, more requires the changing of governmental rules, changing the rules with laws, rather than outwardly through the possession of guns. And what would happen if the rules (e.g. Eminent Domain) were stacked against those who wanted to make those legislative changes?

So, based in the Second Amendment—given law enforcement as it exists in our local, state, and national governments today—the right to bear arms to defend against or change the government seems pointless.

[After seeing Condoleezza Rice on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS [03-04-18 on CNN] I have changed my stance somewhat. She said she believes in the Second Amendment because her father was able to bear arms to defend their neighborhood from prejudice gangs. Perhaps, she would not have risen to the positions she’s had, if her father hadn’t been able to defend his family. I’m not sure what would happen today, if a neighborhood, or family, decided to fight a governmental eminent domain, or local gangs by returning the violence.]