Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Then I must be missing it,

You're conflating two problems. One concerns whether the kinds of firearms 
people own here today would be useful to resist the government. The other is 
whether the type of firearms people own today would be useful in other 
endeavors.

For the latter, the answer, statistically, is yes - target shooting is safe, 
hunting is popular, and having a gun reduces your individual likelihood of 
being harmed in a violent crime.  If you want to argue against that, you'll 
need to say more than "it's obvious".

For the former, we have numerous examples throughout history where 
individual ownership of firearms has protected against violence by 
governments. While obviously there are also cases where the government has 
won, there are also cases where those being invaded have won, or at least 
put off for a long time their own demise. So it's not obvious that any 
government can squash any civilian resistance out of hand. If it were, we 
wouldn't really be still hunting terrorists, would we?

After that, it's just policy, and an estimation of how likely various 
"violence by governments" of various forms are: invasion, coup, organized 
crime taking over the government, etc. And how likely it is that firearms 
would help in any of those particular situations.

We have a process for estimating that latter bit. It's called "amending the 
constitution if enough people are convinced the situation has changed." :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
  "How did he die?"   "He got shot in the hand."
     "That was fatal?"
          "He was holding a live grenade at the time."

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