“Conservatives who are scared of tyrants often ask, ‘Could it happen here?’ Well, it did. Jim Crow, the KKK, lynching, legal segregation — for a period, the South was everything a free man should fear. When Ida B. Wells noted that ‘a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give,’ she was confirming an age-old truth: The gun is a great equalizer, and the state a capricious beast.” – Charles C.W. Cooke in The right to bear arms isn’t up for debate [at washingtonpost.com]