Framing the question around a mood-check, of how the current population feels about the imagined trustworthiness of the government of the day, to determine whether or not citizens should be able to defend themselves against the possibility of a government takeover, is like a council deciding whether or not to fund a fire department based on the average temperature of everyone's air-conditioned homes at this moment.

The first thing that happens when a government gets out of control in abusing a minority population, is that the international community seeks to send arms to that minority.

• The Kurds wanting to be separate from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
• Chechnyans in Russia
• Rohingya in Myanmar
• Tibetans in China
• Haitians living in the Dominican Republic

That is the kind of foresight that the 2nd Amendment represents.

It's only a ridiculous doomsday scenario to people who ignore the news and history.

That political situation has repeated itself throughout history, from as far back as the Israelites wanting to leave Egypt, the American Colonialists wanting to leave England, down to Catalonia (on the news today) fighting to leave Spain.

It is that reliable a prediction that even within America itself there was a Civil War, and, if not for the fact that the South wanted to take hostages who would be denied human rights as a premise of that new, separate nation's laws and culture, I don't know that the North would have won or even objected.

As a celebrated television producer once said through a character the the TV show he produced:

"Man only has the rights he can defend."