People always say that the US has gun ownership in its constitution so that it can challenge the current government/establishment. Is there a reasonable way that this could ever be achieved? I live in the UK and find gun ownership unfathomable but it would be interesting to hear any theories.

Let me defer on this to one of the finest legal minds in country: Alex Kozinski, federal judge, 9th US Circuit.  What follows below is from his dissent in a 2003 case.  It is one of the most spirited defense of the Second Amendment ever written.

"The majority falls prey to the delusion -- popular in some circles -- that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth -- born of experience -- is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process.

In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341- 42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist.  A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

All too many of the other great tragedies of history -- Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few -- were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees*. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."

As a gentle reminder, let me point out that it was only about 75 years ago when the citizens of this country sent tens of thousands of their own guns overseas so that our friends in the British Isles could defend their homes from the invading Germans. 

There is nothing "reasonable" about it: There are things we have to be willing to fight, and die, for.  Best be prepared.

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