A rocket launcher to defend yourself?

I get it - Americans want to have their guns. And I can understand a lot of the arguments in favor of gun ownership. You can build a case that someone has a right to a gun to protect him or herself and their family. You can build a case that someone has a right to a gun to go hunting. You can build a case that someone has a right to a gun for competitive shooting. You can build a case that someone has a right to a gun if they're in the business of protecting the nation - like the national guard or the reserves. In fact - that last one on the list was the real original reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment...it was to protect the nation.

Rewind back to the early days of America - even after the British were beaten back in the Revolutionary War there was still tremendous fear that American was vulnrable to attack. It could be the Spanish coming up from Florida. Or the French - or the British again - coming down through Canada. And most of our Founding Fathers also had an enormous fear of standing armies during times of peace - after all, thousands of years of history showed them that great nations that kept a standing army during times of peace were often taken down by that very army in a military coup. Jefferson wrote exhaustively on this - even threatening to blow up the Constitution since it didn't include protections from standing armies. As Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787: "I do not like [in the new Federal Constitution] the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly... protection against standing armies." And as Jefferson wrote in 1814: "The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves...Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so...."