“I’m gonna remind people now that the largest standing army in the world are American gun owners,” former local news anchor and person who abandons her friendships to pursue personal glory Kari Lake, a GOP candidate for Arizona governor claims incorrectly while appearing on a Zoom call. “We’ve got over a trillion rounds of ammo out there. And that fact is the only reason we’re a country right now and we’re not gonna let them take that away from us because we are protecting this country by being law-abiding gun owners and standing up for our Second Amendment. It is the only thing keeping us free right now, and I wish our friends of the left would figure that out.”
The repeat drag queen performance patron is completely wrong about this. By definition, a “standing army” is a military made up of full-time, professional soldiers, not any yahoo who has an assault rifle in the back of his closet. And what’s protecting our Republic is adhering to the rule of law, not the threat posed by said yahoos to overthrow the government at the behest of an immature, narcissistic reality television character.
And incidentally, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Second Amendment was written to allow those yahoos with guns to overthrow a government THEY consider tyrannical. In fact, the Constitution notes that the so-called militia those yahoos with guns claim to belong to would fall under the jurisdiction of Congress, according to Article I Section 8 of the Constitution.