Tim Barton, who serves as the president of WallBuilders and co-host of the daily "WallBuilders Live" radio broadcast along with his father, Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton, and former Texas state legislator Rick Green, insisted today that the Second Amendment guarantees to every American the right to own "the same level of weapons" as possessed by the government.
Like his father, who insists that individual citizens have an unlimited right to own a tank or a fighter jet, Tim Barton asserted that since the Second Amendment was designed to allow citizens to fight off a tyrannical government, they are entitled to possess the same types of weapons that might ever be used against them.
"It was actually about protecting people from an abusive government," Barton said. "And because of that, whatever weapons the government had, the people also had access to and in the founding era, they had the right to have it. Now, people today would say, 'Wait a second, back then all they had was muskets.' Yes, that's true, but the advancement of technology that the militarilies had at the time, the people had as well."
"The idea was we do not want to give a level of superiority to a government that could become abusive, that could become oppressive and divisive, we need the ability to protect and defend ourselves against that government," he continued. "We wanted to make sure the people had the same means of defense as a government might have offensive weapons, so we need the same level of weapons to defend ourselves as we're going to be attacked with because we didn't want to disadvantage the people from being able to defend themselves against a tyrannical government."
"The Second Amendment was written to protect people [by] allowing them to have the same level of weapons that was going to come against them," Barton said.
