"The founders may have thought citizens should be able to keep a musket if they wanted, but they also wrote into the Constitution that the government had the obligation to 'suppress insurrections.' They hoped that our freedom would be guaranteed by our laws and institutions, not by a guy down the block with an AR-15 and a chip on his shoulder.
They certainly didn't set up our democracy in the hope that every time any group of people didn't like a law that democracy produced, they'd abandon any pretense of support for our system of government and start killing the cops and soldiers who protect us. There's a word for people who dream about doing that, and it isn't 'patriot.'" -- Paul Waldman, in an op-ed on CNN.com. Worth reading the whole thing.
The word is "traitor," and it's the end result of the authoritarian and paranoid culture of the far-right, which doesn't believe in democratic institutions at all, or the Constitution for that matter, but the power that comes out of a gun barrel and rule by the few.
