The idea behind the Second Amendment is to protect home and country By HJS

While Bill O'Reilly calls his FACTOR the "No Spin" Zone, when it comes to the Second Amendment it becomes the "No Think" Zone. He does not seem to get it at all. Waiting period? Get real!

The idea behind the Second Amendment is to protect home and country. Protecting one's home begins with protecting everyone in it, even if they are away at work, at school, or on vacation. Protecting one's country includes knowing small arms and their uses with at least rudimentary ability to use small arms for defense. The country has been very lax in training people to do either.
Most often, when such protection of self and home is needed, it is needed NOW; the predators are not going to wait for anyone to finish the paperwork.

The California riots showed that if nothing else did. If more people were at least trained to use small arms I could see several upsides: trained people would stop being irrationally afraid of the tool itself, could stop thinking of themselves as victims, would think rationally about protecting themselves at home, criminals would have a terrible time selecting victims--not knowing who is armed, trained people could secure their small arms from children and still make them available for use in an emergency, trained people tend to feel secure and confident and much less susceptible to fear, trained people tend to live longer in life-and-death situations.

Another upside of the training is the possibility if not probability that resident professionals can ferret out possible psychotics just as airline instructors could ferret out students whose only interest is using airplanes as bombs. The only real downside I can think of at the moment is the unending screaming of the elite media when their fantasy world crumbles in front of them. Remember peaceful Morton Grove, where everyone was ordered to become armed? It is still peaceful after all these 25 years. The predicted blood-bath fizzled.

If Liberals really want to ban something, they might consider banning criminal inmates from boxing, karate, and weight-training in prison. I see no particular reason why prisons should be physical training camps for predators.

HJS