Why the Founding Fathers gave us they AR-15,and why we need to keep it.

[2aguy]

this is one of the best defenses of the right to bear arms that you will find.......it addresses the anti freedom, anti gun movement and why they AR-15 is becoming a symbol of our freedom.......it isn't even that great a rifle....but it is becoming a symbol of rational thought over irrational emotion and craven short sightedness.....

We don't always choose symbols and what they come to represent......the anti gunners...in their obvious irrational hatred for this rifle...a rifle that kill fewer people than the common tool, the knife, and their obvious leanings toward more powerful and controlling government...are making this rifle into a symbol of American freedom......

So....they don't get this rifle....they can't justify it logically, and we know it will not be the last gun they want......we should make it the gun they never get.......

Charles C. W. Cooke: The AR-15 Is The "Musket of Our Time" - The Truth About Guns

That principle? That Americans are in charge of their representatives, and not the other way around.

In most countries, the regnant political presumption is that the government enjoys unchecked power unless otherwise stated. In America, mercifully, the opposite doctrine applies.

To review the debates that raged both before and after the revolution of 1776 is to learn not only that our forebears thought of government as a means primarily of protecting liberty, but that they did not believe they were obliged to surrender their pre-existing rights when they entered into the compact. It is for this reason that the federal government was given only certain, carefully delineated powers.

It is for this reason that the framers of the Constitution were so keen to impose hard checks on authority. And it is for this reason that, even today, civil society takes on a much greater role in the United States than it does elsewhere.


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All of which, ultimately, brings us back to the AR-15. In my view, there is nothing that better symbolizes the proper relationship between the citizen and the state than a robust right to keep and bear arms.

When one stops to think about it, it makes no logical or constitutional sense for the people’s employees (our politicians) to be permitted to disarm their employers (the voters).

And yet Americans fight constantly to prevent their representatives from doing just that. During heated debates, owners of common rifles such as the AR-15 are asked by those in positions of power, “Why do you need one of those?”—to which the appropriate response, in a voice dripping with suspicion, is first, “Why don’t you want me to have one?”

And second, “If the IRS and the Department of Veterans Affairs need $20 million worth of firearms; and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service needs shotguns, propane cannons and drones; I think I’m on solid ground with my AR, thank you very much.”

Bluntly put, it is impossible to separate out the structure of the American settlement from the scope of the right to keep and bear arms.

If, as many desire, the federal government were to rid the people of the United States of their most commonly owned rifle, it would be ushering in not just a change in the legal status quo, but a profound shift in the balance of power. Crises, as Edmund Burke observed, are perilous for the free.

 

[2aguy]

And he goes on to say.....

It is what William Blackstone was referring to when he praised private arms; what George Orwell had in mind when he sought to keep the “rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage;” what Ida B. Wells imagined when she recommended that endangered blacks give a rifle “a place of honor” in their homes. As the standard firearm of its day, the AR-15 does not represent some bizarre over-extension of the right to keep and bear arms. It is the very core of that right.