The second amendment is what guarantees that all of the other amendments are regarded as rights, rather than privileges by those who fancy themselves as being 'in power.'
It's very, very easy for those who govern to fancy themselves rulers. Begging to be disarmed as a populace for the sole purpose of a false sense of security based on deliberately unclear and misleading statistics and hyperexploitation of emotional circumstances is a result of naive and lazy surrender.
The most important factor to bear in mind here is that disarming people has never resulted in an improved life for the people who were disarmed. Certainly not in extreme cases such as Germany and Austria in the 30's, but even without those examples of rule we have the examples that are ignorantly put forward as our own progression in this country. Britain, who enjoys a 400% higher violent crime rate than the US, and who has had steady increases in gun crime since guns were banned. Australia which has had a whopping 40%+ increase in violent and sexual assaults since banning civilian ownership of firearms for personal defense.
There has never been a single case where the disarming of a population has led to anything but the victimization of that population, either from government or from criminals who become hawks amongst doves.
Secondly and equally important is the gross overstatement of the weight and impact of crime in the US, and the violent crime rate. The US has significantly lower crime than any country in the world with tougher gun control laws, and that is even taking the high crime areas into account. The murder rate and violent crime rate have both dropped by 50% (fbi.gov) in the past 20 years in the US, but that figure is never mentioned because it doesn't induce panic.
The only place in the US that crime remains high is in poor uirban areas. New Orleans and Detroit leading the numbers.
The LOWEST places for violent crime, in fact any crime at all in the US are the places with the highest per capita gun ownership. 60% or more per family gun ownership in the rural and midwest, and those places taken independently have some of the lowest crime rates in the world.
After all the emotional arguments, the numbers just do not support any rational basis to say that disarming people will result in anything positive for the people being disarmed. The criminals won't turn their guns in, and aren't obeying those laws now. The guns being demonized aren't the ones being used in crimes.
The only new threat after disarming the populace is that the government is now free to provoke further unrest without danger of any reprisal or resistance, which is not a positive. Remove the temptation and you remove the crime. So long as the possibility of tyranny is nil, the opportunity for it is also nil. We owe it to ourselves to really accept that the numbers don't justify letting government solidify power and disempower people, which is what this is really all about.
People need to stop being guided by fear, and retake control of their own lives.