Second Amendment Notes 03/13/2013

Yesterday on NPR a program quoted a poll saying that approximately 50% of people interviewed owned guns for self protection, and about 25% said their gun was for hunting. These outcomes were a flip-flop from polls some years ago which showed 49% for hunting and 25% for self defense.

1) This follows the change from Rural to Urban American society: as the rural nature of the country dissipates, hunting tends to be less prevalent;

2) the need for self defense emphasizes that there originally was a need for "group defense" which has also dissipated away since the time of the Founding Fathers.
The armed groups known as militia were obviously not for self defense of an individual, but for group defense of a society or subsection thereof, such as a town or city or state.

The idea of self defense of a radically atomistic individual which we have today seems to be relatively recent, say going back to WW II.

It is quite possible that 200 years ago, polls would have shown people valuing group defense against slave insurrection or Indian incursions as paramount.

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