Another old saw; one from the Founding Fathers:
"When the people fear their government, there is oppression. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."

Really now, why else would the Big Government Left be so intent on disarming the law abiding citizenry? Must make the world safe for the agenda of the leftist power grabbing progressives, right?

Until after the Civil War, when the government needed to appease white supremacists in the South by allowing them to disarm African Americans, all gun control laws affecting citizens were considered unconstitutional. Congress passed several federal laws at the time to further protect the right of every individual to be armed with military weapons (sold to them by the army), even overturning a number of presidential vetoes (Andrew Johnson was a pro-South president who tried to protect white supremacy). Unfortunately, in the case that is now the only legal basis for gun control, the Supreme Court ruled that anyone except the federal government could violate your constitutional rights, in order to set free a group of white supremacists who had disarmed, and then murdered, about 70 African Americans. That allowed the southern states to pass their Black Laws, which included the precursors of virtually every existing gun-control law today, laws that were passed specifically to allow the disarming of blacks and their white supporters, so that they could then be robbed, raped, and murdered more easily.

If you have doubts about the truth of these claims, read a book on the subject. I suggest starting with what is widely regarded as one of the best studies of the Bill of Rights and how our modern view of it is strongly influenced by the Reconstruction period. It's called "The Bill of Rights", by Akhil Reed Amar. He's an anti-gun liberal law professor at Yale. But despite his personal political leanings, his academic integrity led him to exactly the conclusions I just described (to his personal discomfort). Then try "The Day Freedom Died", by Charles Lane. It's about the court decision I spoke of, and the fact that it set back civil rights in this country so badly, that it took almost the entire 20th Century just to win back the approximately 2/3 of the Bill of Rights which have been recovered so far. The court cases that were necessary to regain the First Amendment alone stretched from 1925 – 1963. Then go look up any federal court case involving gun rights, and notice that every one refers back to this case as its source of legal authority.

Even today, modern gun-control laws are racially biased. Laws against "Saturday Night Specials" are specifically aimed (no pun intended) at disarming African Americans in poor urban areas. Look up the term itself. It's a shortened version of a racial slur against blacks, who could mostly only afford small, cheap guns for self-defense. The NFA (the law that restricts machine guns), the Gun Control Act of 1968 (passed to disarm militant Black groups such as the Black Panthers), and the Assault Weapons Ban didn't make any guns illegal (it is perfectly legal to own machine guns, and it was still legal to own "assault weapons" during the "ban"), but these laws made them expensive, so that people of modest means, especially minorities, couldn't afford them. However wealthy whites could and can still get them (a typical machine gun costs around $8,000 – $10,000 – though their actual value is only about $300 – $500 – plus a $200 tax, and can be had on-line or through any number of gun shops).

Now, we can debate the effectiveness, or even the moral correctness, of the original intent of the Second Amendment. But until it is repealed, it protects what the Founding Fathers understood, and many modern Americans still understand, to be a fundamental human right, that they wanted, above almost all other rights, to protect – the right of every citizen to be adequately armed to perform any necessary military, police, or self-defense duty. The only reason it seems so scary today is that this country worked so hard and for so long to disarm minorities, so that they could more easily be repressed, that we've succeeded in creating a fractured society in which the free exercise of our constitutional rights is intimidating to contemplate.

As the unanimous decision in the recent 9th Circuit court said about the Second Amendment, "we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them. Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain." In other words, amend it or live with it.