This is all well and good.

But the weapons used in the latest school massacre in Connecticut were all obtained legally by the murderer’s mother. No doubt, she would have passed all these “new” requirements for a weapon.

All of which begs the question…is what’s being described here REALLY what our founding fathers intended when they set up a country where its citizens were free to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

Did they REALLY intend that we would someday all be required to maintain our own private arsenals of ever-more powerful firearms, live behind gates and walls and put bars on our windows and multiple padlocks on our doors (along with installing all manner of alarm systems) just to keep our homes and our families “safe”?

Or, more appropriately, they REALLY intend that our young children would have to be armed to the teeth just to go to school?

I find it absolutely fascinating that many of the otherwise strict constitutionalists now calling for everyone to be armed are STILL attempting (in vain) to square their own “I’ll keep my guns” attitude with the REAL intent of the 2nd Amendment…an intent that had absolutely NOTHING to do with “protection” and everything to do with avoiding the need for a standing army.

What’s more, our founding fathers set up our Constitution so that what’s contained therein could be CHANGED as time and circumstances warranted. To date, our country has spent TRILLIONS on maintaining a standing army. Yet this 2nd Amendment nonsense still remains on the books LONG after it has outlived any sense of Constitutional usefulness.

Clearly, what the “everyone should be armed” crowd have been describing is simply yet one more indication (as if we needed any) of the absolute, total breakdown of civil society in the United States of America.

Our country has now (quite literally) become an “armed camp”, where more and more of our basic Constitutional freedoms…those that deal with “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”…are being taken from us day by day, all in the name of some fleeting sense of both private and governmental “security”.

Indeed, as Benjamin Franklin once opined, “Those who would trade in their freedom for some small measure of protection deserve neither.”

And while those who insist on toting all their guns around may FEEL like are “more secure” by doing so, I contend they have ALSO given up a HUGE amount of their other “freedoms” in the process, the least of which is the freedom to feel absolutely safe and secure in their person and in their homes, schools and places of work.

For example, I can’t begin to tell you what a wonderful feeling it is, while visiting with my family in Canada, to know that when I meet and greet another person walking down the street, that there is also a 99.9999 percent chance they AREN’T carrying a concealed weapon under their coat.

That’s because there’s no need for them (or me) to do so in Canada.

And even though Canada probably has the same per-capita share of “nut cases” as the United States does, it’s a wonderful feeling to know that, in Canada, the chances of such persons ALSO obtaining a lethal firearm to blow people away are slim to none.

And while our friends to the north DO have their share of gun crimes, the rate of such crimes PALES in comparison to that same rate south of the border.

What’s more, the vast majority of the weaponry used to commit those crimes was obtained (either legally or illegally) in the United States of America and smuggled across the US/Canadian border. That fact, too, is a sad, sad commentary about the rapidly deteriorating quality of life in the United States of America.

I’ve always found it ironic that we in the USA keep saying that we are a peace-loving nation and that we want freedom and democracy for all.

Yet, lately, more and more of that so-called “democracy” is being forced down the throats of others (and other nations) at the point of a gun.

Sadly, we have now become a nation that forces others to embrace everything that it is not, while at the same time, condemning everything that it has become.