Walter E. Williams spoke at the Heritage Foundation about the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution being there in order to overthrow elected government.
What this guy is saying is not true. Ask yourself, why would people trying to create a representative government, of the people, BY the people, for the people, want armed, violent rebellion, using guns in particular, to overturn what they could
accomplish by voting? They wouldn't. That is illogical. Our founders described our election process as a means for non-violent rebellion against the government. So, NO they did not want us to bear arms for the purpose of overthrowing an elected government as Walter E. Williams says. Elections are for that purpose.
The 2nd Amendment came out of the writings and speeches by George Washington, who, being military minded, spoke about the need for this new nation to be always at the ready to protect itself from foreign adversaries since it as of yet did not have the National Guard, but militias instead. What George Washington was talking about was the idea behind the militias that were ready in a minute, "minute men" that played an important role in the American Revolution. There were Minutemen in almost every American colony, but they had the greatest numbers in Massachusetts, where they made up close to 1/4 or higher of their organized colonial militia. This group had been turned by words of John Adams to seeing Massachusetts as an entity separate from Britain and the King. Knowing this the royal authorities in Boston sent a sizable force to Concord to seize munitions at the armory there which they considered the King's property, put there to defend the colonies from the American Indian threat. Shooting erupted at Lexington between the Minutemen and the British. The Minutemen were there to protect the armory, which they saw as theirs.
George Washington knew that the focus of the British at Lexington was the armory. He also knew that colonists at the fronteers used guns as a means to get sustenance as well as being a means to protect themselves from American Indian raids. He knew that the Minutemen militias were there to quickly respond to an external adversary’s attack on a colony, now a State. He spoke about incorporating this into the new nations way to protect itself. It is for this reason that the 2nd Amendment says, "A WELL REGULATED MILITIA, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Logical.
Walter E. Williams is right that the 2nd Amendment wasn't about letting people own guns so that they could hunt. Although the founders understood that that was a reason that colonists, now citizens owned them. But he is dead wrong to even think that a new nation trying to establish a representative government that would last, wrote into its founding document a blessing of sorts for its violent destruction. It is just plain illogical and smacks of treasonous, if you ask me.