As the framers of the Bill of Rights understood, the only viable response to violence and tyranny, foreign or domestic, is an armed population. Legally armed passengers could have stopped the terrorists that flew airliners into the twin towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001. Armed adults (teachers, staff and administrators) could nip school shootings in the bud. University research studies have repeatedly found that armed citizens reduce crime. Crime statistics clearly show that the jurisdictions with the greatest percentage of armed citizens have the lowest violent crime rates. Home invasions, for instance, are lowest in jurisdictions where there are many armed residents and highest where local regulations violate the peoples' right to own and bear arms (Washington D.C., for example).

I am not suggesting that every adult citizen be required to be armed. I am suggesting that the proper response to terrorists, criminals and the criminally insane is to repeal or strike down the myriad local gun control and anti-gun laws, so that any citizen in good standing who chooses to protect him or her self (and fellow citizens) with a firearm may do so without interference from federal, state or local government, as is their Constitutional right. Big Government proponents and liberal commentators will recoil in horror from such a suggestion, but it is the logical response to incidents such as school shootings. Increased gun control legislation will only make it easier for terrorists, criminals and the deranged to murder with impunity.

Do you remember that schools were declared "gun free zones" before the latest spate of school shootings? Do you remember that passengers were prohibited from carrying firearms onboard commercial flights long before 9/11/2001? Such idiotic and repressive laws merely guarantee maximum mayhem and unopposed slaughter when lawbreakers choose to ignore them.

The right to personal protection is a natural right. It is why Cape buffalo have horns, elephants have tusks and bees have stingers. That is part of the justification for the Second Amendment. The other reason is to empower the citizens of the United States to resist governmental tyranny and crime at home and invasion from abroad. It works, too, as the famous quote from Japanese Admiral Yamamoto on the impossibility of successfully invading the U.S. during the Second World War, because of the armed American population, demonstrates.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not negotiable; they are not "living documents" subject to political correctness and popular opinion. They were intended to be inviolate, as any legal document intended to protect the rights of the people, especially a minority, must be. The Founding Fathers said what they meant and meant what they said, as anyone who has read the Federalist Papers knows. The Bill of Rights was never intended to be "interpreted," only read and honored.

If two-thirds of the citizens wish to change the Constitution, there is an amendment process for that purpose. Legislation from the bench, the Interstate Commerce Clause and Presidential Executive Orders are not part of that process and may not legally be used to abrogate any part of the Constitution and certainly not any of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.