Straight shooters

"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.

Those are the actual words of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, held sacred by our nation's gun nuts.

They are powerful words indeed, regardless of the fact the clause is poorly written, and clearly means something different than almost everyone thinks it does. No matter that many of its fervent defenders don't even know what the Second Amendment really says.

True, others have memorized and can unthinkingly recite these words, sort of like Roman Catholics in the old days repeating Latin incantations they didn't understand.

Language and the meanings of words change over time, but it is clear that what adoption of the Second Amendment really meant was that people should be allowed to have weapons (arms) in case the government had to quickly throw together a militia to drive off marauders, or put down some local illegal uprising, like the Pennsylvania farmers who rebelled over whiskey taxes a couple of years later.

Naturally, it logically follows that the citizens ought to be able to keep these arms in their homes, as in, on two hooks over the fireplace, since most people didn't have anywhere else to put them to begin with, and many used their rifles to go hunt dinner, much of the time.

Bear in mind too that the nation in which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written was a collection of small, rural states, with a total population of slightly less than four million people about the size of metropolitan Detroit today. High-tech arms meant a single-shot musket, accurate to within a hundred yards or so, maybe.

Once you fired it, it took close to a minute to reload. If you shot it more than a few times in a row, it was apt to overheat and misfire or blow up in your face. This was not seen as a weapon of mass destruction, but more like a household appliance one could use for defense.

So it was logical to stipulate that the citizens had "the right to keep and bear" arms, when these were the arms. What's crazy is that these words, written for practical reasons in a primitive, largely rural world, are today being used to justify making it legal for a mentally troubled person to buy a high-tech weapon of mass destruction and turn it on helpless civilians.

Anyone who thinks the framers of the Constitution intended that is, to put it politely, crazier than a shithouse rat.

Nobody I know has remarked on this, but what's going on here isn't a problem of rights so much as a problem, first of all, of language, specifically, the word "arms." Throughout much of history, "arms" meant bows and arrows and pieces of metal that men whacked away at each other with, at close quarters. Then came gunpowder.

The Founding Fathers may have expected continued improvements in weaponry. But none of them could have imagined anything like Jared Loughner's Glock, a weapon of mass destruction good for one thing only: killing.

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