@Zooey72:
I think it is more of a societal thing. One of the reasons I am proud to be an American is that we TOOK our freedom from England when England was (close to) at its strongest. You look around the world and you see these third world countries bitching and moaning about “its not our fault, we were a colony”! Boo frigg’n hoo. So were we, and instead of being given our freedom (which India was, if you believe Ghandi did it I have a bridge to sell you), we took it. Taking freedom is much different than having it given to you. Look around the world at the old colonies, most of them are run now dictators and are poor. Very few took their freedom, most got it because we pressured England to drop its colonies after the war (which they had to do, or no Marshall plan $).
We have a Constitution that allows us to have weapons. That was not put in there so people could hunt or defend themselves against muggers. It was put in there so that the government does not have a monopoly on force.
You make it sound like the americans took it without help, from a british empire who had nothing else to do. The fact is that the american revolution would probably not have succeded if this was the case. The british war in india got most of the british resouces, and the french (the worlds strongest military power on land at the time), combined with the spansih and the dutch helped a great deal. In fact, there are very few wars of freedom (after 1500) that have won without help from an outside power helping, and usually they need to declare war to do enough. The nations you are belitteling is exactly the nations that would never get aid for their revolutionary and rebellious wars, and exactly the nations that got their freedom with the least help from an outside power. The indians did it by making sure that it would be too costly for the british to stay there.
When it comes to the second amendment, don’t be naive, the government does have monopoly on force, there is no way a rebellion would work, taliban militias is better armed than the american civilian population.
The one way to ensure (IMO) that the government cannot use their army against the civilan population is to have a conscripted army, if every person have served, then every member of the army thinks of himself as a member of the population and massive nonviolent protests will turn the army against the government. It is less violent, and has a greater chance of success. The moment the army is a professional army, thinking of themselves as outside the population, working for a salery, then you are in trouble as a democracy.
EDIT: forgive my harsh tone, it is not meant that way