it doesn't apply anymore. It will not make a difference. The continuing difficulty the US military is having subduing militants in Afghanistan armed with relat

it doesn't apply anymore. It will not make a difference. The continuing difficulty the US military is having subduing militants in Afghanistan armed with relatively unsophisticated weapons suggests otherwise. A subtle, boiled-frog style slide in to totalitarianism is still possible, of course, but the direct approach would likely bring reasonably effective armed resistance. A nuclear weapon, tank or drone is effective against an isolated base or compound, but when insurgents are mixed in with the population of a city, soldiers go after them with rifles. Very similar rifles are sold at Walmart[0]. That said, the self defense argument is more applicable to a modern society. Unfortunately, it turns out to be really difficult to evaluate its effectiveness. Comparisons to other countries are problematic due to the huge number of variables involved. Every study I've found purporting to offer a number of self defense incidents is severely and obviously flawed (studies with low numbers only count incidents where the police took a report of a crime; studies with high numbers include self-reported incidents of dubious veracity). The number of violent crimes in which a criminal was visibly armed falls between the high and low numbers for self defense, so it is not possible to say whether guns are used by civilians to stop crimes more often than to commit them. One less-problematic correlation I've been able to find is that states enacting right-to-carry laws generally saw their murder rates fall faster than the national average afterward - often substantially faster, suggesting that the perception that any person might be armed provides a deterrent effect. I can't even buy a fully automated machine gun. The Supreme Court has not made an unambiguous ruling on whether or not you can have a machine gun. As the law is currently written, you cannot own a newly-manufactured machine gun as an ordinary civilian. DC v. Heller established a minimum level of protection - that guns in common use for lawful purposes cannot be banned - but not a maximum. US v. Miller suggests that guns suitable for militia purposes cannot be banned. Given that (selectively) fully-automatic rifles and light machine guns are the standard weapons for infantry soldiers, it is very likely that a legal challenge to this prohibition would succeed. If Amendments can't be passed anymore (practically) then there is something broken about this country. The last amendment was 20 years ago. That's not an unusually long time. I didn't mean that all amendments are impossibly difficult; I meant that a repeal of the Second Amendment would be impossibly difficult. [0] http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sig-Sauer-M400-Enhanced-Carbine-ODG-with-Rifle-Bag/21677318 http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sig-Sauer-M400-Enhanced-Carbine-OD...