I wanted to add something which is rightfully controversial and unpopular because it comes from an entirely different and somewhat naïve era.

It's easy for us to overlook in this day and age what kind of context they had in 18th-century America. They didn't have much of a concept of a revolutionary dictator, a monstrous autocrat who emerged out of a popular revolution. Back then, dictators and despots already ruled everything through heredity and divine right. The dictators who arose from revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were an out-of-context problem at the time. To them, assassination didn't carry connotations of Kennedy or Franz Ferdinand. It was a wilder and more violent age. Probably one that shouldn't be emulated.

But it's astounding how rarely it's acknowledged that the second amendment was meant to act as a violent deterrent against our own government. It isn't to defend against home invaders, or hunt, or whatever. Of course the staunchest supporters of the second are often the very ones voting in the crooks they should be ousting, or at least acting as a deterrent for.

That part of our central legal document exists explicitly to facilitate credible threats of assassination as one of our government's checks and balances, and we like to dance around that ugly fact. At this point it obviously doesn't work the way things did in the 1700s, like most things from three centuries ago. We now know that method doesn't end well, and alternatives should absolutely be pursued until there's no other option.

But today we also live in a time when the most massive and damaging crimes done by those in government--or the pseudo-government of industry--carry no punishment at all except an abstract (and impotent) threat of being voted out of office in a few years. And our absurdly low approval rating / incumbency ratio should show us that there's something deeply wrong with that avenue. I think more people should be concerned about the implications of extremely low approval ratings combined with near-perfect rates of re-election. This casts a doubt about democratic legitimacy that we cannot deny or brush away.

I think at least serious prison time should be on the table. And of course I mean the real prisons that we send normal criminals to. But that is unheard of. We need to acknowledge that checks and balances have already failed in a very fundamental way.