Search This Blog

Sunday, January 19, 2014

An American Tragedy


Thumbs Up For Acceptable Kill Rates



In the past week, some children have been shot.

In most of the world, you have to look for places where there are wars and rebellions and particularly child soldiers fighting to find comparable statistics.

Here, however, these statistics of mortality are acceptable under the Anarchy of Weaponized Society.
There is a vast difference between bearing arms and properly bearing arms.

How does one properly bear arms?

I believe the Second Amendment states it:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Therefore, one properly bears arms if the intention of the weapon's owner is to be part of a well regulated militia.
A well regulated militia is one which is properly regulated.
Thus, the proper use of arms should be part of the regulation exercised by the well regulated militia.
(The militia may be regulated from above by governmental authorities, but it may also regulate to those below under its militia authority; regulation runs both ways.)

A well regulated militia does not carry arms into neighborhood art fairs, nor do they hide loaded weapons under a bed when the grandkids come over to visit.

--

4 comments:

Ruth said...

It's clear, simple, and so misunderstood. Excellent post.

I thought of you when I read this poem by Edward Hirsch just now in the Poetry Foundation's daily email:

Early Sunday Morning
BY EDWARD HIRSCH

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot
but now I'm one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It's like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else's motorcycle
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I'm sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early morning risers
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.

Montag said...

Wow! It reminds me of "Studs Lonigan" in the depths of its near despair.

I hate despair.
I hate empty tin cans rattling behind the abandoned car from a frustrated ceremony.

My humiliations are dust to be shaken from my sandals.
I am the motorcycle, the man, and the red-haired girl...

I am more akin to Rumi than Hirsch, I think.

Ruth said...

Good!

Truth is it was mostly the Sunday mornings drinking coffee at a local spot that reminded me of you.

Montag said...

I am mystified.

We never got that cup of coffee together, so how could it remind you?

Mystery.

But the cafe with sooty windows and people who have lost their dreams is too much like Harry Hope's Bar in "The Iceman Cometh".

It reminds me of the society I live in. South Eastern Michigan is filled with wandering ghosts.