Dennis was a lifelong Democrat until Ronald Reagan turned him around with this singular statement.

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

We care about who has nuclear weapons, not simply that nuclear weapons exist. So, too, with guns. The Founders knew if such an imbalance of power existed between the people and the state—if the people were disarmed and only the state had weapons—it would not bode well for liberty. Totalitarianism was Dennis's field of study in graduate school and anyone who has studied history can see that governments have been the biggest mass murderers in history.