Shortly after the Sandy Hook tragedy, David Barton appeared on Glenn Beck’s television program where he made the case that the Second Amendment was intended to guarantee to citizens access to any and all weapons that might possibly be used against them in the name of self-defense. And since citizens might have to defend themselves from the government, they were entitled to own the same types of weapons that the government possesses.
Under Barton’s logic, the Second Amendment therefore guarantees to citizens the right to own tanks and bombers and attack helicopters and destroyers and even nuclear bombs because that is what the government owns.
But that seems crazy and he couldn’t possibly mean that, right?
Wrong. That is exactly what he means because he made the same point today on “WallBuilders Live”:
The Second Amendment is not to arm you less than it is to arm the government. Because what specifically happened was if the Americans had not been able to go home and grab their guns off the mantel over the fireplace, they could not have taken on the British coming after them.
The British was their government and the Americans had to have equal firepower with whoever was coming after them and that’s why they went to Fort Ticonderoga and got all the British cannons and came back and used those. That was just individual citizens doing that.
So the purpose of the Second Amendment was you have got to be able to defend yourself, your rights, period against anybody and that sometimes means it may be your government coming after you. So if the government has got AR-15s, guess what? The people can have AR-15s … Whatever the government’s got, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself against. So there was no limitation on what you could or couldn’t do with the Second Amendment; it was a self-defense amendment and if everybody is coming at you AR-15s, you don’t defend yourself with BB guns, you get AR-15s.
