I live in Massachusetts. My ancestors started the whole tea party thing back in 1773. I'm convinced that they were also the founders of gun-nuttery through what I shall call the myth of Bunker Hill. An ad-hoc group of patriotic citizens, warned by Paul Revere and his confederates, got out their muskets, formed themselves into an army, and so bloodied the British at Bunker Hill that the world's greatest military power was forced to abandon Boston, never to return. So goes the myth.
The reality, of course, was different. The battle wasn't fought on Bunker Hill but on neighboring Breed's Hill, and the British won. The myth-perpetuators forget their geography, and it was geography more than any other factor that made the British leave.
As a radio broadcast engineer, I'm acutely aware of the geography of greater Boston, which is essentially a bowl ringed on three sides by hills (the fourth is ocean). FM radio stations in Andover and Haverhill can't put good signals into the city because much of it is shadowed by hills in Somerville, Malden, and Medford; stations on Asnebumskit Hill in Paxton, west of Worcester, on the other hand, would get into Boston just fine if they were allowed to run enough power; that's where Major Armstrong built the first FM station in New England. But I digress.
If you're an occupying army, you need to hold the high ground, especially when it commands the waters the ships bringing your supplies have to use. The British knew they couldn't hold Boston and were preparing to depart even before Washington showed up on Dorchester Heights with his stolen cannons. The Confederates in New Orleans were to learn much the same lesson in April, 1862, when Admiral Farragut's fleet appeared in the Mississippi River, which is the highest point in town; but again, I digress.
The myth ends on March 17, 1776, celebrated in Suffolk County to this day as Evacuation Day; the farmer-soldiers won the day, the British sailed off, and that's why we must never let some latter-day George III take our guns away. The myth of Bunker Hill is enshrined in Article XVII of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the oldest written constitution in the world, if I'm not mistaken, dating from 1780):
"The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it."
There, you have it. End of story, right?
Well, when Washington and his armed citizenry left Massachusetts in the spring of 1776, they went to New York, where geography is a little different. They tried to defend Manhattan, which is an island, against the world's greatest naval power, and got their butts kicked clean across New Jersey. Washington was lucky to escape New York with his head, and the city (such as it was) stayed in British hands right up to the end of the war. If the British ultimately conceded American independence it was only after Washington had transformed his farmers' rabble into a trained professional army led by competent officers, and after the French had come in, transforming a mere colonial rebellion into a war among major powers. But New Englanders tended to forget about those far-off developments; for my ancestors, and the tea party types who seem to have inherited their perspective, Bunker Hill was all that mattered.
It's odd that folks down south, where tea-partyism and other delusions are particularly well entrenched, seem to forget that during the unpleasantness of 1861 to 1865 all the guns in Georgia couldn't stop General Sherman from burning his way across the state and more than half way through the Carolinas. The Bunker Hill myth dies hard.
I have southern ancestors too, by the way; my mother was from Massachusetts but my father was born and raised in New Orleans, and has roots in Cajun country and in Virginia.
My gut tells me nothing good will come from bringing up gun control for discussion right now. The old adage about teaching a pig to sing comes to mind, and Mitt Romney should not be perceived as the lesser of two annoyances.