Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the others who pledged their lives, fortunes, futures, plus something that's missing today from too many of our national politicians, a sense of sacred honor, to found our nation dedicated to individual liberties. This puts me in mind of one of the more important grievances that sparked our war for independence from British rule. The British tried to confiscate private arms despite the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which gave all citizens of the king, including colonists, the right to keep and bear arms for self-protection. Obviously, the absentee British government's effort to illegally disarm the colonies was an attempt to strengthen central political control. I don't think the term "police state" had been invented then, but that scenario sure fits today, only our absentee government now sits in the District of Columbia. The British plan was to disarm the population, then follow with soldiers illegally entering homes and shops to confiscate "contraband" and "seditious literature" and to "punish the treasonable," according to the collected letters of the Colonial British governor, Gen. Thomas Gage. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes, constitutional scholar and former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, in a speech to University of Virginia law students: Our war with England was a just cause, for it meant our independence from increasingly harsh military, not civilian rule. Our war was fought against an unjust and cruel system that mocked the civilian rights guaranteed to all subjects of the King, including our colonial ancestors — We fought a standing army, some of them foreign mercenaries, for our right to be free and independent. We fought the king's standing army with our volunteer civilian army and with our own free militia armed with the firearms the King would have had his soldiers confiscate.