This entire ruckus, as framed by the extremely liberal media, is an exercise in bashing a straw man. They begin with the assumption that the gun-toting protesters are right-wingers intent on intimidating others in the arena of political ideas.

Anyone who has paid attention, however, will have noted that in both New Hampshire and Arizona, the individuals making their Second Amendment points were not Republicans or even conservatives, but libertarians.

That's right. Libertarians who spent the previous eight years railing against the Bush police state. Now they're raising the old cry of "taxation without representation," among other things. Why? Because the roughly $3 trillion deficit Obama has already locked in amounts to about $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the nation -- an amount that won't be paid off unless by those who never had a say in the matter. Given that our total debt is now over $20 trillion, perhaps you can appreciate that something extremely unfair to coming generations is afoot in this country. To call it "slavery" is no exaggeration, unless you believe that involuntary servitude must be utterly complete in order to count.

So the purpose of these armed demonstrations is to remind our government that the militia (by law, basically the armed populace) will not stand by peaceably forever while such abuses accumulate. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to guarantee that no would-be tyrannical government can prevail against the militia. And to think everyone on the left treats that as a bad thing! Germany's Jews sure could have benefited from that kind of culture, as could every population in history that has been subjected to totalitarian rule without voting for it.

No, this isn't about trying to suppress the expression of ideas. It's about expressing opposition to tyranny, period.