[DanaC]

A thoughtful answer, thankyou.

I understand, I think, the historical roots of guns in America. It's really their place in modern American culture that occasionally baffles me *smiles*. Not the owning of them - I can see lots of very good and compelling reasons why someone might own a gun. Not least the practical applications in terms of hunting and home defence. Open carry though I find difficult to get my head around. Though some in this thread have offered some good reasons for why it is apprpriate in some instances.

It's the emotional place of guns I think I have the most difficulty with.

A few minor points from your resopnse:

Genocide was not something the Founding Fathers had any experience of

I suspect the Native peoples of America might argue with that one *smiles*. And given that the Founding Fathers were drawn primarily from European cultures, they were no doubt already aware of the genocides committed by their forefathers in places like South America. There's also an argument to be made that the slave labour which they and most of their peers made use of was itself the result of a form of genocide.

But no: they had no experience of being the victims of genocide.

But it's still true that armed populations do not suffer genocides, and genocides happen in places where the populations are not armed

That, I'm afraid, is not true. The genocide in Rwanda was the result of an armed population turning on itself. The power of one group lay in its semi-organised and rallied nature, not that it was armed and its victims unarmed. Most people on both sides had similar access to the kinds of weapons used in that genocide (mainly machetes).

Genocide by the state against a subject group within that state may usually have the features you describe, but even then it is far from absolute. And genocide by one nation's forces against another may be made possible by a disparity in the kinds of weapons available to the victim population as opposed to the invaders (as was the case for the Incas).

Unless your population is not just armed, but armed to the teeth with the most powerful weaponry available being armed is not a protection against genocide.

It may - may - be some protection against a state power that turns against its own people. But even then: it is more likely that state has the more powerful weapons and the more organised force. What is more likely to save a population from internal conflict in that scenario is not the presence of weapons in the general population, but the lack of appetite amongst the state's forces for use of deadly force agains their kith and kin (as in the early stages of the Russian Revolution).