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So the federal government requires us to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. States require us to buy auto insurance. But the insurance against government tyranny that was given to us free of monetary charge by the Founders is "just a pile of bull#^&#^&#^&#^&."
Having health insurance doesn't prevent illness. It helps us to more physically and financially be able to survive illness and return to good health. Auto insurance does not prevent accidents. It makes it more possible to financially survive the misuse of autos and maintain our use of them. The Second Amendment is our freedom insurance policy. It does not prevent the misuse of weapons. It makes it possible to resist an armed government which misuses its weapons to strip us of our unalienable rights--to insure that we do not lose our liberties.
No doubt to many of us now, that sounds quaint. A nice, old fashioned sentiment that is no longer relevant, a historical conceit. But is there some evidence that we should not have any fear of an overreaching government? Or worse, that our government should not fear its citizens? Is a government which is confident that its citizens have been fully pacified through its subjugation of the educational system, its transformation of the political system including the founding structure, its massive regulation of the economy, its collusion with the media, its incremental transfer to itself of powers from the people and their local and State governments . . . is such a government truly not to be feared?
Is there some evidence that we actually no longer need the rights and liberties that the Constitution guarantied to us? Have we been persuaded that we no longer need the insurance policy, no longer need outdated notions such as freedom, liberty, rights?
Well, on reflection, we are as, a society, consumed with the notion of rights. But not some ethereal notion of unalienable ones. We are perfectly satisfied with provided rights rather than inherent ones. What we inherit we are responsible for. It is up to us to protect inherent rights. The rights given to us by a government which we do not fear are its responsibility to decide and dispense. Some may have such rights. Others may not. We become divided by "rights." We don't all have the same old unalienable rights. Just the ones given to us by the benevolent government we trust, do not fear, and which does not fear us. Some we have in common. Others are special to preferred or protected groups. They can be more a matter of enforcement rather than codification. "Gays" can force a baker to bake a "gay" cake. But no one can force a baker to make a chartreuse cake. Those who love the color chartreuse have not been given the right by government to demand chartreuse. Of course, the baker no longer has the unalienable right to his property. Those who make x dollars do not have the right to pay the same tax rate as those who make y dollars. Those who score higher test rates may not have the right to enter a university over someone who scores lower test rates. Certain groups need special rights to get a leg up. Some have the right to say certain words, while the use of those words by others are considered hate speech. Some are granted free speech at publicly supported schools, others can claim free speech to shout down, without prosecution, those they disagree with. And on and on and on.
The notion that the world we presently live in should cause us to have no reasonable fear of government tyranny is not based on actual evidence, historical or otherwise. But the greatest threat to the freedom we have inherited is not the government, rather it is our complacency. Our willingness to constantly allow the government to assume the responsibilities that rightly belong to us as individuals, and our ignorance of how economies work (or don't), and the dangers of all-powerful centralization (politically and commercially).
The actual evidence, if rightly looked at, is that discarding the framework that guaranties us individual freedom, with its insurance policies (the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment), and leaving our lives and sacred honor in the hands and ever changing whims of a centralized and fairly unlimited bureaucracy is "just a pile of bull#^&#^&#^&#^&."
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