How can anyone defend the brutal Castro. Maduro's not much better. Where are private Venezuelan guns?
As someone else stated, no one has defended Castro. Stop trolling.
Come to that, I think we need an equivalent of Godwin's law for socialist-baiting. It seems as if it's impossible to criticize some aspects of modern commerce without invoking the extreme reaction of being Stalin's fellow travellers. It has surfaced from time to time in these pages and it's silly. (If I remember right, one regular commentator in this section referred to California's Stalinist Economy, presumably an overreaction to the state's support of the Democratic party. Calling California, of all places, a hotbed of socialism boggles the mind.)
Your fascination with an armed citizenry seems over the top to me. The idea that we need to arm ourselves to protect ourselves from the government is a little out of time. But just to prolong the discussion, were you ok with the Black Panthers arming themselves and calling themselves a militia to protect civil rights marchers? Because, if memory serves (and it's kind of vague, I'll admit), I think they were arrested for behaving pretty much the way those militia were behaving in Charlottesville a year or two back.
The US Constitution is a model document, no question. But it didn't prevent slavery or the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the 14th amendment did not prevent Jim Crow. Nor has it done much about the attacks on habeas corpus in modern times. As a backdrop to legislation, it is an important document, but it might be better to regard it as a working document, like any other, rather than attach quasi-religious reverence to it, because it hasn't always helped the people who needed protection the most.
