[derleth]

The government doesn't care about your rifles. Not even your semi-automatic ones with sights and stocks and lasers and so on. They barely even care about a well-trained militia full of people who are angry with them: The US Armed Forces destroyed something a lot scarier than anything the NRA could muster when it steamrollered Iraq in 2003.

So get off your horse about needing guns to protect yourself from the government. The government could destroy you and your guns in a second if it wanted to.

If you want to be persuasive, stick to defending yourself against home invasion. That's a band-aid on a serious problem, but at least it's a historically and logically honest argument.