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". . . . The right to bear arms was explicitly enumerated in your Constitution for the purpose of resisting oppresion by your own government. Constitutionally, the benefit of the doubt rests with the citizenry, who are constitutionally entitled to "fire on federal agents" when those federal agents are involved in criminal trespass...."
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Except that your dead wrong on all counts.
For one: "A system of laws, and not of men" -- John Adams. John Adams, who destested the British, nonetheless undertook the exceedingly unpopular DEFENSE of the British troops involved in the so-called "Boston Massacre". He did so on the principle that no man charged with a crime should be without competent counsel. And, overarchingly, because justice and law should be ABOVE politics.
For another: the NRA notwithstanding -- it being a private special-interest, not a law-making body, and a gun industry-front -- the Second Amendment does not do that the NRA, the paranoid illiterate gun-nuts, and the America-hating Scalia assert. The first draft of that which became the Second Amendment read, in full, as follows -- the final clause being the ONLY posited individual right debated concerning that Amendment:
"The right of the people [PLURAL; as in, "WE the people"; it isn't "We the individual," or, "I the people"] to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated [by LAW, as expresssly stipulated in the Constitution: Art. I, S. 8., C. 16] militia being the best security of a free country: but no person [INDIVIDUAL] religiously scrupulous of [AGAINST] bearing arms, shall be compelled [INVOLUNTARY] to render military service in person."
That last clause having been voted down, the Second Amendment has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with "individual" ANYTHING. That fact is underscored by the DEBATES of it by those who not only DEBATED it but WROTE it.
The ONLY topic of the Second Amendment is WELL REGULATED MILITIA; and a MILITIA is NOT AN INDIVIUAL. And: the head of the militia is the state's governor and or president of the US. The gov't is not Constitutionally in the business of attacking itself.
Source: Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), Ed. by Helen E. Veit, et al.
The Bill of Rights/Second Amendment were framed by the first Congress under the newly-ratified Constitution. It was drawn from the existing state constitutions/bills of rights; the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" appears in those bills of rights in what were and are termed MILITIA CLAUSES; a MILITIA is NOT an INDIVIDUAL.
Note: unlike the private individual, the militia is a PUBLIC institution, governed and regulated by a different set of laws than the PRIVATE right to own guns.
Last but not least: The Constitution stipulates (Art. I., S. 8., C. 16) that: Congress shall have Power To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute [ENFORCE] the Laws of the Union [which INCLUDE to Constitution], [and] suppress Insurrections . . . ."
The is NO "right of revolution" against the FRAMERS' gov'ts.
