photo #9275340

The Founders did not write the Second Amendment so citizens could hunt deer. They wrote it because they had just fought a war against a distant government that treated their weapons, their commerce, and their conscience as property of the crown.Read Federalist 46. Madison argued that an armed citizenry is the last check against a standing army turned inward. The Anti-Federalists went further, warning that any government powerful enough to guarantee your safety is powerful enough to remove it. The right to bear arms was never about government granting protection. It was about the people keeping the power to protect themselves, including from the government itself.So the modern pitch, hand over the rifle and we will keep you safe, is not just insulting. It fails on its own terms.Consider the record.The U.S. Postal Service, an operation Congress created and funds, has lost roughly $109 billion since 2007 according to the Government Accountability Office. Fiscal 2025 alone added another $9 billion loss on top of $9.5 billion in 2024, per USPS financial filings. GAO has kept USPS on its High Risk List since 2009. Congress wiped $107 billion in obligations off the books in 2022, and the bleeding never stopped.Now the promise of protection.In New Orleans, the average police response time to a 911 call recently hit two and a half hours, per a City Council commissioned report. San Francisco averaged 76 minutes. In one major department, high-priority calls involving weapons went from a 12.7 minute average in 2018 to 19.1 minutes by 2022. A violent encounter is often over in 90 seconds.And the telemarketer punchline is not a joke.The FTC's Do Not Call Registry holds more than 246 million numbers, yet the agency has recovered only about $52 million across 127 resolved cases while Americans file hundreds of thousands of complaints a year.Cannot deliver a letter without losing money. Cannot answer 911 in time to save a life. Cannot stop a robocall. Trading a rifle for that promise is not safety. It is surrender.