From the article:
"Keeping a few unregistered guns may well look like an insurance policy against a future that could all too easily resemble the past.
The United States has been happily free of dictators, purges, and occupation, but it doesn’t take a large dose of paranoia to look back over history and wonder if this one country is necessarily a permanent exception to the troubles that have engulfed the rest of the planet.
And even if America never proves to be Weimar Germany with weaker beer, or to have the border integrity of France’s Third Republic, elected officials, like those in New York and California, do their reputations no favor when they violate promises that registration records will never be used to ease confiscation schemes."
"That said, the underlying point of all of this evidence of extremely well-armed scofflaws around the world is this: the scofflaws’ motivations don’t matter; agreement with their reasoning doesn’t matter; sharing or even respecting their values is entirely irrelevant. All that matters is that, from one country to the next, across barriers of language and culture, government officials in even the most benign, stable democracies that have attempted to disarm their subjects, or to limit the weapons available for legal ownership, or even to do no more than track gun owners and register guns, have run into overwhelming resistance. Mass defiance has crippled registration programs, hobbled confiscations schemes and made a mockery of licensing programs.
Given a choice between complying with restrictions on firearms ownership and defying the law, a clear majority of people in most jurisdictions have chosen rebellion. The tighter the law, the more obvious the rebellion, to the point that the vast majority of firearms in civilian hands in Europe are owned outside the law.
If history is any judge, that’s probably a good thing. But even if you don’t agree, this is a world in which civilians are well-armed, and intent on staying that way."
