It would not be correct to imagine that the current state of our rights have a single source, just as it would be wrong to suggest that any individual right played no part in the current state of our liberty.
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Tip O'neal (speaker of the house)stood by a window looking out on Pensilvania Avenue that night, and made this observation. That with all this turmoil in government, there are no tanks on the streets, soldiers to protect the house. Just a few cars driving by, and some folks looking from the street on this historic night.
I appreciate deeply, perhaps more than most, what Jefferson and John Adams did for this land, and it's peoples, when they authored the Constitution.
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Indeed. This describes a trust in law that comes with a history of stability and observance of men's rights as provided by that law. That isn't our only experience. About a century before O'Neill's observation we had some unpleasantness between the states, and in the 1960s and 1990s some populations have rioted violently at least in part in reaction to their perceptions of the legal system.
However most of our experience is in a system that provides individuals recourse through the legal and political process, and trusts them enough to allow exercise of those rights. Within that context, the government should have no fear of the militia, or of it being properly and effectively armed.
That speaks to the differences of balance between government and people in our model and that used in a lot of the latin world. When people note the importance of specific rights, especially those enumerated in the COTUS, they are very often decrying an erosion of the tradition of our rights not only in terms of arms.
In a system in which the militia are substantially disarmed, individuals are subject to speech codes enforced by government, eminent domain is used in unconventional ways, the electoral process is doubted by a growing population, or government serves as a medical and financial nanny or tyrant, it is fair to wonder how long O'Neill's observation of confidence and the ensuing order would last.