has anyone read this article?

"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- George Orwell1

Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one of the most radical statutes in the world.
- See more at: http://www.thepolemicist.net/2013/01/the-rifle-on-wall-left-argument-for-gun.html#sthash.33tAWV42.vPywAvvk.dpuf

It often seems to me that guns are to liberals what drugs are to conservatives. Liberals respond to to the real damage that guns do as factors that exacerbate (but do not cause) destructive behaviors is the same way conservatives have responded to the real damage that drugs do in exacerbating destructive behaviors – with the impulse for prohibition, enforced by the law and its armed agents, the police. Quick, pass a law! Call the cops! has become a virtually automatic reaction of conservatives and liberals alike, according to their various tastes; it’s “the same inability to understand the fundamental nature of the problem at hand coupled with a perpetual, short-sighted faith in the inherent justness of well-meaning legislation.” (Mike King)
- See more at: http://www.thepolemicist.net/2013/01/the-rifle-on-wall-left-argument-for-gun.html#sthash.33tAWV42.vPywAvvk.dpuf

more at http://www.thepolemicist.net/2013/01/the-rifle-on-wall-left-argument-for-gun.html

my apologies if this is a re post.