The Slow, Methodical Erosion of Your Rights

You must pardon me, I was driving along and gave a nice little speech [ignore the ego please] on this and am attempting to write it from memory.  So you think your rights are still around, eh?  When someone says "What rights, I haven't lost any rights!"  Does a slave realize he is a slave if has know no other thing than slavery?  Does he realize that through hard work, perseverance, and a little luck he could actually become the owner of his own estate?  Not if has never read, seen, or experienced freedom.  When our founders first started working on a new government, the people were all about a Republican form of government.  Minor problem, the majority of the population didn't know what form of government that was.  Many knew only monarchy and wanted George Washington to be the King.  The horror which must have crossed his face when he heard this.  The founders realized that a people who knew neither history nor Liberty could not understand Liberty unless they were taught history.  As such, they knew they needed to educate the people on what their rights are and how to protect them.  This is the situation we find ourselves in today.  I am partial to the second amendment and I will focus on this one.  In certain states in this country it is the right of the local police chief to allow you to have a license to own a weapon and carry it if you ask for permission.  The fun part is if a certain town has an anti-gun police chief he can make it almost impossible to get the license.  So, the most fundamental right of a man or women of legal age can be confirmed or denied at the whim of a person who may or may not be elected by the people.  If elected, that means the people, by majority vote can deny another person a fundamental right.  If not, then a politician can deny you that right.  Either way means you do not have the right to keep and bear arms which is a right found in one of the first LAWs of the United States.  So for a person to argue rights have not been removed is rediculous.  But, those people who argue you have your rights turn around and say "Well, what do you need a weapon for.  There are police and stuff like that to protect you and you don't need to hunt for food."  This is a great indication they do not understand the second at all.  The second was not designed to protect you from the common criminal or to hunt for food.  Rather, and this is backed up historically, the second was created to help people responde to a government which behaves in a criminal way by either ignoring the laws of the nation OR by violating the rights of the individual (please do realize there is no such thing a collective rights, that is a communist concept and we all know how that played out over the past 100 years).  Your ultimate job is to protect your family from an abusive government.  A government which slowly nibbles around the edges of your rights is worse than a government which outright takes those rights.  Why?  Because a nibbler will eventually succeed in taking ALL your rights while a grabber will fail because of the knee-jerk response of the people.  Remember, Hitler/Mao/Stalin all made slow, inexorable changes and then, when it was way to late, grabbed it all.  Hitler was excellent at this.  He was able to convince the people Jews were sub-human and to blame for all the problems in Germany (the world really).  It was just one more step to exterminating the "vermin" as he would call them.  This is the situation we find ourselves in today:  A slow, methodical erosion of our rights to the point many people say "Huh, I still have my rights".  Just one more step folks, just one more.