NRA is too radical

[Tellos Athenaios]

suggest that the rate of deadly violence -- by firearm or otherwise -- was significantly lower in the Old West than in a modern city. This despite the fact that firearms were virtually ubiquitous. Does this not undercut your first point?

Such rates are a function of multiple inputs, one of them being the number of conflicts between people which depends on population density (for obvious reasons). One can surmise that this particular input is of a higher than linear order in population density. To draw a wildly inaccurate analogy here: since in a large modern city like Detroit there live about as many people as in the 13 founding states when the constitution was drawn up together, statistics from that time -- which, by the way, probably do not include figures from Native Indian populations -- are quite meaningless in the context of modern Detroit. A more fitting comparison would be Paris back in the day, with its ban on duels. (And when arms were eventually banned in the city of Paris, it resulted in a marked drop of all sorts of violent crime rates.)

3. Even if we accept the notion that the prevelance of firearms itself begets violence and more deadly violence, and therefore accept TA's argument that public safety is not better served by individuals protecting themselves, the reason for firearms was not, according to the founders, primarily for the purpose personal protection or of hunting, but to provide citizens with the werewithal to resist tyranny should it arise. It is this latter reason that leaves me inclined toward the opinion that almost any restriction of arms is unconstitutional.

This is a completely different argument. You could go down the historical context lane of arguments and then arrive at the conclusion that de-facto this particular argument/issue has been rendered completely and utterly irrelevant for well over a century now. Try and stand up against the tyranny of the USA armed forces & their evil taxes, and see how long exactly your prised weapons will last if they're determined to suppress you... Then the obvious question is: if the wherewithal to resist state tyranny has been rendered de-facto obsolete, why would this reasoning still apply to (fire)arms?

Now, I am not from the states so I might be lacking a certain emotion or attachment towards the USA constitution, but to me the utility of this argument is about as much as of complaining to the Federal Government for being “biased” towards American English when in fact American English is not even an official language of the USA. Or of that register of subversive groups plotting to overthrow the USA Federal government.