Second amendment

Unidentified people in uniform, operating from unmarked vehicles, are taking people from the streets in the US. In America, not some far-off authoritarian state, and today, not some half-forgotten long-ago.

What is it that all the people who support gun ownership in the US so busily say?

Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.

– Hubert Humphrey

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Castro, Pol Pot, all these monsters began by confiscating private arms, then literally soaking the earth with the blood of tens and tens of millions of their people [...] There can be no free speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom to protest, no freedom to worship your god, no freedom to speak your mind, no freedom from fear, no freedom for your children and for theirs, for anybody, anywhere, without the Second Amendment freedom to fight for it.

– Charlton Heston

What they worry about – or what they say they worry about – is that agents of the deep state might turn up and start taking people away and that those people, not being allowed to bear arms, would be unable to resist this oppression. And so citizens must be allowed to bear arms to stop this happening.

Well, it's happening. Where are you, gun owners? What are you doing about it? Oh, you're doing nothing, because it wasn't those citizens you were worried about, was it? You only want to defend the right sort of citizens, you know, ones who agree with you, ones who have skin the same colour as you, who like the same kind of sex that you do and who worship the same god you do in the same way as you do. How surprising.