Well, according to gun nuts the sacred Second Amendment obviously includes military-grade rapid-fire weapons, and besides, ordinary, God-fearin', white American folks will need those powerful guns to fight the government when it inevitably makes its final move under some secular LibDem POTUS (probably the Antichrist) to create a dictatorship and take their precious guns and bibles away. And that distrust of government is also why you can't have background checks, because giving even an inch to the gun-control crowd will lead to even hunting weapons and shotguns being taken away, and then they'll have nothing to defend themselves with. Or so they say.
I got into this with a guy at a bar last year. He said his guns would protect him from the government. He'd be able to keep them from taking him with his guns. When I asked him how his guns would stop a government drone from blowing up his house under control of a kid 1000 miles away, he said they would. When I laughed, he wasn't real happy.