How Do We Deal With Guns After Las Vegas?

Our nation is, once again, shocked by gun violence, this time in Las Vegas. How a person could perpetrate such a horrendous act against innocent people, is unimaginable.  What can we do to protect ourselves from such monsters?
Some are calling for further restrictions on the Second Amendment right of Americans to bear arms.  Before we give a knee-jerk amen to that call, let’s push back for the moment, and view the issue with the perspective of several centuries, doing so we can better understand the reasons why our Founders made this amendment a part of our constitution, and why such protections were included in English law prior to that.
A person desiring to protect himself from the misdeeds of others, arms himself. This goes for a person individually, as well as people collectively.
History is full of egregious examples of governmental power in the hands of tyrants who abused it on a large scale. In the century which just passed, it is estimated that in the Soviet Union, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people. The Soviet government had their ideas for how they desired the Soviet Union to be run, and was brutal to any who opposed them. Many millions alone died due to the cruel methods used by the government to collectivize the farms.
Within that same century, there are many other examples underscoring the validity of the adage: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When some people get into power over others, they forget where they came from, and that they put on their pants just like everyone else.  
According to the Dec. 15, 2010, New York Times, in China, “the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths. Between two and three million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction.”
Let’s not just talk about mass murder. Currently, the Turkish government is making a mockery of their representative government and establishing an autocracy. And closer to home we have the Cuban example, where the dictator took control of a thriving populace, driving them into poverty and forcing many to immigrate to America. And look at the previously prospering Venezuela, which sits on the world’s largest oil reserves, yet now has to go into a neighboring country just for toilet paper. The government there has eliminated the elected National Assembly and set up its own hand-picked, rubber-stamp body, despite mass uprisings of the citizens.
Can we be assured such things would never happen in America?  Of course we cannot, because it already has, which is why Washington is now our capitol, not London. Because the American people were armed, we were able to displace King George III.
This is the reason our Founders wrote the Second Amendment into our constitution, so people would continue to have the means to avoid being at the mercy of tyrants. But would armed Americans be any match for a rogue government’s armed forces with modern weapons? Of course not, but millions of armed citizens could be a deterrent.
As our nation grapples with solutions to Las-Vegas type problems, we must deliberate from an historical perspective. In our effort to solve a big problem, we mustn’t create a bigger one.