O'Meara,

you have written a better defense of gun ownership than most. However, to answer some of your points:

(1) The toilet paper thing? I have lived in one of the top 5 metropolitan areas in the US my whole life and do not recall this incident at all. I have always had access to "the white stuff" and can't imagine this story is true. When did it happen?

(2) There are many reasons why the meat argument is fallacious. among them: You can live a long healthy life with no meat whatsoever. If you feel you must have meat because of your personal preferences, you don't actually need guns to hunt. People fed themselves meat for millions of years without guns, remember. If farmed meat disappeared and all Americans went out with their guns to hunt, we would denude the country of animals and quickly be back where we started; our pathologically large appetite for meat cannot be sustained by hunting. And finally, the types of guns used for hunting are not what most gun-control advocates object to, anyway. This is one of many ways in which the world has actually CHANGED since Thomas Jefferson wrote, rendering his slaveowning ass a bit less relevant to the modern world...

(3) Your old buddy "Tom" Jefferson lived in a different era in other ways too. We live in an age where the most effective weapons cost millions and millions of dollars, and as citizens ownership of individual firearms is no longer effective in preventing dictatorships. You can have all the assault rifles and automatic pistols you want, but if the government truly became a dictatorship they would run you over with a tank and take them from your cold, dead hands just as Mr. Heston likes to say.

(4) The erosion of civil liberties under Nixon and Ashcroft is scary, of course, but I'm not sure how having an arsenal of assault weapons would give me any more such liberties. Say I'm a law-abiding Muslim being subjected to unfair strip-searches in airports. Will walking around with an Uzi help me out in some way? It is only when mere anarchy is loosed upon the world that an arsenal will be of use. I personally would rather that there be no such arsenals than that there be many, even if I could have one of them.

(5) I'm interested that you say you want weapons for the same reason the police have them, which in your view is so that they can do a statistically poor job of pursuing criminals after they have committed crimes. I must say the logic of that escapes me.... Obviously you meant for a dfferent reason than the police have them. Care to elaborate?