Which leads on to what to me, and a good many others, is the fundamental reason for having an armed people: The need to restrain our own government.

Oh, Lord, not one of THOSE loonies.

RE: the boxes metaphor, which originated with Stephen Decatur Miller, South Carolina "fire-eater", Congressman and Senator in 1830- and those cartridges were to be used to protect the "freedom" of southern slave owners to own property in human beings.

RE: Douglass using this same metaphor: the speech was made at the time that large numbers of Blacks in the South were being regularly murdered for attempting to exercise theit right to vote (which is what Douglass was talking about if you don't take his quote out of context. And it wasn't the government doing the killing: it was the Ku Klux Klan.

Note to VT Yank- its not 1830 or 1867 any longer - time you realized its 2014.