And there's the rub. Except for the last few decades, keeping a firearm was universally regarded as a normal, wholesome, safety-minded thing to do. Mouseketeers pranced twirling six-shooters, kids wore cowboy holsters, it threatened nobody. Even today, in tens of millions of homes across America, guns are for safety. Guns stop crimes.
Guns save lives.
Those who seek to disarm decent citizens are promoting a radical new notion that gun ownership is solely related to crime and terror, and is so dangerous, you dope, stop now before hurting yourself. Only the rulers should be armed. You have no such rights, never did. The media paints gun ownership as radical and extremist, but clearly, it is this new anti-rights agenda that is radical and extreme, because the gun owners are the ones with 200 years of tradition, history and law on their side. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.