BACK TO THE OLD WEST?

I'm ready, any day, to hear the Governor announce that the State is bankrupt, cannot afford even to default, that he is going home, and to advise that the rest of us do the same. Load up on food and guns, and don't make any friends.
We'll be back in the thrilling days of yesteryear.
The is an irrational attraction toward such a goal. How else do we explain the trend of taking guns to places and occasions where nobody needs them? Whatever happened to the sense of achievement that came from a town's being able to boast that men didn't need to pack iron on the streets anymore? Missing holsters was a sign of civilization, like electricity, a mark of gentility matching sophisticated metropolises back east. Nowadays, packing heat grows common. Do gun toters miss those times when a man's future was only as good as his draw?
Gone is the notion that local authorities could sensibly insist that hombres check their guns when they go to town. Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson would have to deal with legally knowledgeable gunslingers now, citing recent court decisions upholding the Second Amendment as virtually sacrosanct. The lawmen of old, aware that alcohol and firearms do not safely mix, prudently sought to separate the two. Apparently they were wrong. The Founding Fathers, it seems, meant for drunks to commingle with weapons wherever and whenever they like.
Other rights are tempered according to society's needs. Most members of the NRA are probably at odds with most members of the ACLU, regarding other amendments in our Bill of Rights. But an ACLU member who believes that one ought to be allowed to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or that a religion that calls for casting live virgins into a volcano has a place in a free society is rare. Finding NRA members who believe everyone, regardless of mental state or criminal record, should be allowed to carry weapons about everywhere, is not difficult.
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is literally true. But we also know that people with guns kill a lot more of their own kind than those without guns. Could it be that the finality of gunplay, in some people's minds, renders other rights moot? Can we not conclude from this logic that all human rights are guaranteed only when all of us are fully armed, all the time? In our folklore, this condition existed before the twentieth century. "Give me liberty, or give me death," was not merely our ideal. It was our everyday reality, in those halcyon times.
The thrilling days of yesteryear, when the only options were total liberty of action, or total liberation from earthly worries, can be tremendously attractive. We live in difficult times, when solutions to complex problems require co-operation and hard work beyond some people's capacities. Small wonder there are those who reject the present for an ideal future similar to a fabled past. To them, any social contract is not only unpleasant, it's a sin. Stalin's Gulag starts with having to pay for working sewers.
It is human to want freedom. But our nature also needs a sense of belonging, of helping out the clan. Humanity's major quest is for an always elusive balance between the two. The question before us now is whether we want a massive collapse of our polity, or if we're willing to make the sacrifices necessary to preserve it. If we would keep our society, then guns, whether we have them or not, are irrelevant.