A recent CBS/New York Times poll showed 92 percent support for expanded background checks while simultaneously showing that 46 percent of Americans think laws covering gun sales should be either made less strict or stay the same. "People don't seem to like the idea of ‘gun control,’ but they still want the government to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill" says Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA. That survey is basically saying, “I don’t want a dangerous person to have a gun, but I want one just in case they do get one.”

How can people seem so contradictory?

Please don’t write back with thoughts on why guns should be banned and so forth. I’m not trying to make a case for owning guns or not owning guns. I’m just laying out what I believe is the actual underlying cause of why this will never ever change. And, maybe it shouldn’t. Read on to see why THAT may actually make sense to you.

I was in Estonia with my wife not long after Estonia was made free again from the Russians after WWII. It was an iron curtain country from 1940 to 1991. People would regularly disappear. Shipped off to Siberia, found dead, or sent to the Afghan war. They had to work the jobs they were told. Everything was scarce. Life was hard. Essentially Estonians were subservient to the occupying Russians. An incredibly bad time for them and millions of others in Eastern Europe.

But, now they were free. Their country was now a free democracy and a good one. A very pretty, very friendly country.

In talking with one of her older relatives about being free for the first time in his life, his answer stunned me. With a simple shrug, he said “I don’t know if it’ll last. We probably will be occupied by someone else again. Perhaps a few years from now. It’s the way it is.” For reference, because of their strategic location bordering Russia and sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, Estonia has been occupied by many nations over history. We talked more.

What was instantly clear was that he was NOT used to being free. NOT being able to live his life any way he wanted. And it was also clear that he wasn’t prepared to fight for his freedom. Not that he was scared to. He was one of the ones whisked away in the night to Afghanistan to fight for Russia for years. So he had been on a battlefield. Freedom to him was a new concept and an unfamiliar feeling. It wasn’t a big deal. If he was going to be a subject of another country again, he’d grudgingly do it. That was a decade ago. I suspect that freedom is a stronger feeling today, now 25 years after Estonia independence. At least I hope so.

His thoughts are probably the thought process of every single person living in a North African Arab country; at one time or another every single South American country, Central America, much of Asia; China and North Korea for sure, certainly all the Eastern Bloc countries and Russia. In one way or another all have lived under Kings, Tyrants, Dictators, Politburos and oppressive deadly regimes. ALL those people spent much of their lives, generations actually, NOT being free. That’s probably 75% of the world’s population. Maybe more.

After being founded by people fleeing from, and then fighting against an oppressive King, the only country on earth that has never had it’s people NOT be free is the U.S.. Even during the civil war.

Maybe there’s a few others but I can’t think of any. Not a one. But then I’m not an expert historian so I could be wrong. (Yes Canada, but there was the King/Queen/British rule period for almost a hundred years beyond the U.S. pulling that plug in 1776.  1867 Dominion is formed. 1982 Canada is actually Canada on its own as we now know it.  But even if you add in Canada, that’s only two countries.

Here’s where guns enter the picture. Because of all the above there’s the second amendment. The US founders wanted to make sure that the US government could not make it’s citizens subservient too, if it got dominated again by, what was then in old England, the powerful and rich 1%. That’s why they fled England to begin with.

They wanted much of the population armed to keep that 1% and government in line if need be. Hence the constitution, Bill of Rights, and all that.

Read that sentence above again about the 1% and think about it for a second as it relates to today. The 1% hypothetically as the real string pullers behind the curtains comes up a lot in discussions today.

George Washington's thought was similar to today's 'mutual destruction' tenent for nuclear weapons. A bad government leader will think long and hard about pushing citizens too far if they're armed enough to fight back and take them out. It basically forces a time out until more reasonable thinking takes over.

But wait… I’m not using that as an excuse for writing this. It’s something else.

That something else is freedom itself. To an average American, especially one over 35, freedom trumps everything. They grew up with the pledge of allegiance in schools. Famous phrases like, “Give me liberty or give me death and Remember the Alamo.” have been seared deep into their consciousness. They have been taught that it’s honourable to die fighting for freedom for their country (and it is). Over a million US soldiers have died for that. Americans have been taught to fight wars on behalf of unfree people in other countries so that they too can be free. (yes, many of those wars were a sham and totally screwed up, but the people were nonetheless fed the ‘make everyone free’ kool aid).

Freedom is DEEPLY ingrained in the psyche of most Americans. As Kris Kristofferson wrote in ME AND BOBBY MCGEE, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. To Americans, that means I would rather die fighting for my freedom than possibly buckle under to you (whoever ‘you’ are). YOU can be the government (if it got oppressive), slave owners, the 1%’ers, or another invading nation. They (ALL Americans of all colors) will put up with losing virtually everything else, but not their freedom.

Hence the civil rights fights, the occupy wall street fights, and a zillion others. People want to be free. Americans probably more than any other people on the planet. It’s hot wired into them. They know no other way. They WILL fight for it.

So what does all that mean? How is that interpreted in the real world? It means that if you want to defend yourself, your family, or your country from the possibility of losing your freedom -- you will do it. And you will do it with a vengeance.  To do that, you would need a weapon. Sticks and knives aren’t going to cut it. Rifles with 5 or 10 bullets versus an army that has 30 round magazines and tanks isn’t going to cut it. If you’re going to put your life up for grabs to defend your family, home and country, you are going to seek some sort of equipment parity with your enemy. The whole point of a 30 round AR-15 type rifle is parity if you need it.

That’s why 1/3 of all American households have at least one gun. Not for thwarting robbers, not for hunting, not for target practice, or anything else. Those are reasons why they USE a gun from time to time.  But the reason these millions of people HAVE the gun in the first place is because of the possibility that they may have to use one to fight for their freedom.

Plus, that’s over a 170 MILLION households with guns. Are they really going to take those away or have 170 MILLION guns turned in voluntarily? Not a chance. That genie is out of the bottle way too far and it will never be put back in because of the sheer math alone. And then of course there’s the current debate of ban or not to ban, 300 year history, and so forth.

Right thinking or wrong, owning a gun is the ingrained American insurance policy for freedom, just like car or fire insurance. A gun unequivocally equals freedom. Gun owners may pray that the time never comes when they’ll need it. Hell, they may even have one and totally dislike the thought of having it. But there’s no way they are doing without it.

Trying to take away those guns is deemed the first step to taking away their freedom. So it’s unacceptable on almost any level. And virtually anything will be tolerated except that.

That last line is perhaps the hardest to grasp. Many brutal, senseless, and horrible things have happened lately by crazed people. But, they are no more horrible than is currently happening in Syria, Iraq, and countless other regions of the world. Compare all the horrible school shootings here to so many senseless ethnic purging of millions by Dictators, Boko Haram, ISIS, oppressive regimes, and others, and the few terrorist acts or stupid gang shootings become statistically insignificant.

To those who value their freedom as just described, above all else their thinking is that as tragic and senseless as those shootings have been, they are not nearly enough to have them give up their ability to protect themselves and, unlike my Estonian relative, put their own freedom in peril.

The only thing that may eventually change all this are the naive young of America. They've lived their entire life in freedom. They've never had to fight for freedom. What's sad is they'll push to disarm America in the future and at some point win. And that will be the start of losing their freedom, probably forever. They'll shackle themselves.

Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and all of the rest of the founding fathers were correct in their thinking. The second amendment will never be obsolete or wrong for the times, because every time has bad people, bad governments, and power hungry leaders who want to make their citizens buckle under oppression. That has been a fact for thousands of years an it still goes on today in countries like South Africa, China, Venezuela, Iran and Syria.

The terrible history of oppression doesn't have to repeat. It simply never stops.