This is quite odd.

With a few exceptions, politicians generally don't care about the Constitution or the writings of the Founding Fathers.  It's certainly not a partisan flaw - George W. Bush violated the Constitution just as gleefully as Obama's been doing.  In fact, I can't think of a single president in the past half century that's had even a slight amount of respect for the law of the land.

This, of course, make's Barack Obama's recent comments all the stranger.  In an attempt to reduce opposition to his gun-restriction agenda, Mr. Obama told gun owners that he was constrained by the system the Founders put in place.  He dismisses concerns about overreach by government - in order to defend overreach by government.  Cognitive dissonance, much?

Mr. Obama seems rather arrogant, if not intentionally so, in this dismissal.  Consider this: the Founders, shortly after winning a revolution fought primarily by citizen militias equipped with privately owned firearms, wrote an amendment stating that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  The obvious intent was to provide a state-level counterbalance to Federal power.

These comments are a fascinating insight into the mind of politicians.  Mr. Obama literally is arguing that there's nothing wrong with subverting the Founders' intent because it won't be subverting the Founders' intent, even though it is.  It's a bizarre, almost circular line of reasoning, similar to the idea that freedom can only be protected by taking it away.  By saying that it's silly to worry about having a means to defend yourself from government, he is stating that the Founders' concerns were silly, while paying lip service to the Founders' system.

Then, there's his comment that tyrrany can't happen because "the government is us."  Well, no, it's not.  We live in a republic, not a democracy.   "The government" is, in fact, the few hundred senators and representatives, judges, the president, department heads and Heaven-knows-how-many bureaucrats.  While I normally would avoid Godwin's Law like the plague, I can't help but dispute the argument that democracy prevents tyrrany by pointing out that, of all people, Adolf Hitler was also fairly elected.

I am not calling Mr. Obama an equivalent of Hitler by any means.  However, his statements reflect the concerning attitude of complacency common in America, that "it could never happen here."  It's a dangerous sentiment.