I've always felt the purpose of making firearms illegal was to give the excuse to the police to immediately put someone away caught carrying a gun. Actually, I have no problems with this, in our urban centers today, there are so many guns out on the street, that it is a police weapon of great power to help ID and lockup criminals. If you can't bust 'em for anything else, firearms possession will do just fine.

The guy who keeps his guns at home for protection is another thing all together, he is no threat to anyone outside his house, and I find it very unsettling to deny him the right to protect his own home.

Even though I own and use firearms, I am not opposed to gun control, in fact, I'm all in favor of it, even banning them all together. However, I can't think of any way this can be done without creating a very lucrative black market in weapons and criminals will still be armed. We tried Proihibition with booze and it failed, and it's not working with drugs, either. As one friend of mine put it, "they'll smuggle them into the country inside bales of marijuana." But I do think there are lots of things that can be done to make certain types of firearms illegal, along with some types of munitions which seem to have been developed specifically to defeat the armorer's and the surgeon's skill.

The old NRA fantasy that every citizen will stop tyrants and defend the country with his home weapon is rubbish. In Cuba, most everybody is in the militia and has an assault rifle or machine pistol issued to him. And even in Saddam's Iraq, every house had a Kalashnikov. People who think they're going to become a heroic freedom fighter when the invaders come quickly lose their enthusiasm when faced with the iron heel of oppression. Effective armies and even militias have standardized weapons and munitions.

Even in colonial days, a single muzzle-loading rifle was of little use against an Indian war party, It was a highly accurate hunting weapon requiring skill and long practice, it was extremelly expensive, and it took two or three times as long to load as a musket. It was not fitted with a bayonet, so it was useless after it was fired. The decisive warfare of the day required repetitive, massed musket fire, the rifleman was essentially a highly specialized sniper, an auxiliary soldier operating alone, and vulnerable to giving his position away to almost certain retaliation in the days of black powder. In spite of their highly publicized exploits in battle, they rarely decided the day. How all of this ties in with the language of the second amendment, well-regulated militias and bearing arms, perhaps some scholar of colonial America can help elucidate.