One of the reasons given for the right to bear arms is that it gives citizens the ability to resist a tyrannical government. I have a particular problem with this idea in that I believe the concept of what constitutes a tyrannical government has become open to some interpertation. Now it might be easy to say that a tyrannical government is one that doesn't uphold the costitution, but the supreme court has been busy for over 200 years showing that there are a lot of areas in the constitution open to interpertation, and those 200 plus years haven't just been a case of court activism. I do, however, think it is fair to say that a tyrannical government is one which suspends democratic process or squashes freedom of speech, I don't think a tyrannical government is one that requires someone to have health insurance, or upholds membership to the U.N., or regulates the financial sector. After all if democratic process are in place no matter how stupid what the government does, there will be another election, and a chance to replace the idiots and rescind what they did. And if you don't want a system with those safegaurds you're not an advocate of the constitution anyway.
It is really shocking the level to which political dialouge has sunk, I can't remember a time when so many outright lies have been passed off as truth. The government is not some awful institution ruining our lives and beyond our control, it is what it is because it is what we as voters permit, voters have had many chances to make radical change in the way government funbctions but they have always put it off. And I say this fully acknowledging the cancer of lobbyists and bureaucratic thinking that plagues government.
Consider this about one third of voters say they are Democratic, about one third say they are Republican, and one third say they are independent. What that means is that the people who decide elections are probably the most fair minded individuals out there. This means that the current liberal incarnation of government wasn't given to us by a crazed bunch of extremists, but by the most level headed voters out there.
I also must say that I find the current complaining about how the U.S. may never be the same, or is being harmed beyond repair by some conservatives to be in really bad taste. Do you really mean to imply that the policies put forward now are the greatest threat to the U.S. ever? Because unless they are the U.S. will be able to fix itself just fine, if there even is anything the matter. And consider how liberals have suffered, the last really liberal president was LBJ, Clinton wasn't even a liberal darling with how much he took on theconservatives agenda to keep his power base. In that time liberals have lived through Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, and I can assure you through many of those years they thought the world was coming to an end.
So if you don't like the way things are now, suck it up till the next election, the U.S. will survive just fine, (well maybe not just fine but that has to do with other things than liberal or conservative policies). Your government is just doing what voters asked it to do, and so it isn't being, of all things, tyrannical.