The founding fathers are dead.

[rrneck]

May they rest in peace with our eternal gratitude for the work they did in the founding of this nation.

The United States is a country of some three hundred million people. We have the ability to individually cross the entire continent by land in under a week. Millions of tons of goods, legal and illegal, cross our borders every day. If some idiot falls off a skateboard in Los Angeles somebody in New York could see a video of it within the hour.

Concerns about what the founding fathers actually meant in the late eighteenth century regarding the technology and culture at that time, while interesting, are mostly useless in application to current issues today. I don't think they were necessarily concerned with printing presses, muskets, newspapers, or log cabins. They were concerned with something much more fundamental. They were concerned with people's relationship to each other and the role of government in that relationship.

While our society has changed a lot since 1776, people have not. We still fight, steal, rape, and murder just like we have for a million years. When any one of us perpetrates such an act of cruelty, while there is an albeit perverse relationship between the aggressor and the victim, a relationship between those involved and the government does not exist. That's why it's considered uncivilized, because we are not using the laws of our civilization to settle our differences.

Along the timeline of an assault, the closer we get to the moment the trigger is pulled or the knife is swung, the less government is able to influence the nature of the relationship between aggressor and victim. In that final rush of events, there is no relationship between those involved and government, so any discussion about what the founding fathers meant by what a militia was is or comma placement in the second amendment is moot.

The Constitution of the United States affirms the rights of each individual and a framework whereby we, as a collection of individuals, may govern ourselves. We no longer live in small hamlets where newcomers were immediately recognized and watched. Most of us have occupations that will never require us to physically exert ourselves. Many of us have no idea where our food comes from or what it's like to slaughter an animal for meat. And yet, for all our civil and technological sophistication, we are still human. And some of us still do what some humans have always done. We still fight, rob, rape and steal.

There is a huge disparity of force between us and those who may be able to travel hundreds of miles anonymously to appear before us to harm us with little warning. An aggressor has tremendous latitude in the selection of the time and place of an ambush given our own ability to move about anonymously over equally great distances. We live in a culture where a great deal of information can be gleaned about us without any actual contact with us or even anyone we may know. The ability to individually defend ourselves is no less important now, and probably more so, than it was two hundred and fifty years ago.

Fortunately we live in a wealthy country with a good system of government. That good fortune means very few of us will ever have to personally defend ourselves from attack. But it still happens. And when it does, the best and perhaps only viable option for self defense is a gun. Any discussion of sensible gun laws need not concern itself with the founding fathers original experience of technology, but rather should always include a solution for the disparity of force between an individual living in this time and place and another who will probably be much stronger, agressive and desperate.