I've got a dear old dad who has been musing on guns since the Arizona shooting. He wrote the following "Model" Proposal for the local paper but I thought some folks here would appreciate it as well.
I have heard that people have argued about The United States Constitution since before it was written. Once on paper, the disputes got worse. Since the time that guy Jefferson put his quill back in the ink well, I guess at least a hundred Supreme Court justices, thousands of regular old judges, millions of attorneys and uncountable clients have used up billions of hours arguing over not only what the Constitution means, but also about all the other laws thought up in its name. What a waste of time for everybody! All the disputes led me to believe it had to be a lousy piece of writing.
I decided to read it! Admittedly, it is made up of a lot of words, many of them pretty highbrow and snobby.
What an experience! I guess those guys understood what they were writing, but there is so much. It is no wonder what caused all the confusion. There is so much about equality and all these rights to do this and that and then come sections about what can’t be done. Reading it was a real nightmare! I figured the best thing to do was to look someplace in all that writing that really identified the simplest thing that people want in their lives. Not just Americans, but pretty much everybody. What would that thing be? Peace and quiet, I said to myself. As simple as that! Peace and quiet!
Peace. That word jogged my memory a little and I recalled looking up a very fancy word from the Constitution that meant the same thing, but, when I went back, I couldn’t find it. Turns out, it wasn’t in the Constitution itself, but in this thing at the beginning called a preamble. It was like a set of reasons for the Constitution and one of them was to keep peace between husbands and wives. “To insure domestic Tranquility,” it said.
“Tranquility” was the fancy word! I remember thinking: What government could possibly keep a husband and wife from quarreling?” Then I found out that “domestic” could mean the home country, you know, a person’s homeland.
So, one of the ideas was to insure peace and quiet in the whole country, not just between husbands and wives.
As I was thinking this over I remembered another place in the Constitution that talked about people having a right to “bear Arms,” but it didn’t mean arms, like, well, your arms, it meant weapons, like muskets or those funny guns with a big barrel like a tuba. I was really confused enough already by what I had read. I mean pages and pages of stuff about rights and things that were really hard to understand. Now I saw the basic reason for all the arguing. The Constitution doesn’t make sense. I said to myself if everybody has arms, how can you have tranquility? You know, if everyone has a piece, how can you have peace? (My wife thought up that one. She said a little humor always helps people see things better.)
Then I got it! If everybody is armed, no one is going to take the chance of offending somebody else, anybody else. So, having guns makes the country peaceful. If you are really afraid the guy in the movie line may blast you, you will be sure to be on your best behavior. That Jefferson cat knew his stuff. You have to really think about the Constitution to get to understand it.
Then I thought: I don’t have a gun! How can I do my part to “insure domestic Tranquility?” (Someone told me that quoting the original language a couple of times helped make the writing stronger by reinforcing the idea.) But it wasn’t only me that didn’t have a gun. The problem was bigger than just me. A lot of people didn’t have guns. I know a whole bunch of folks do have guns and are doing their part, but not everybody is helping. Why is that? And then, it dawned on me. Guns are expensive and not everyone can afford one, which means that many citizens are unable to do their duty.
That’s when I got this idea I’m working on. If the government canceled maybe one aircraft carrier, they would probably save enough dough to supply everyone with a gun, even people who already have guns. (That’s really the only fair way. As the Constitution points out, we are all equal.)
Then peace would prevail forever because everyone would be afraid to do anything that may get anybody else angry enough to shoot him. And there’s the other side also. Everyone would have confidence knowing that he could shoot anybody he had a beef with because that person prevented him from his “pursuit of happiness.”
What could be easier? It’s a perfect solution to keep peace and quiet! I looked around the internet for guns. Boy, there’s so many to choose from it makes your head spin. But I dug around for about half an hour and found the right one. I like that AK-47. It is really helpful if the guy you get annoyed with has a lot of friends with him. That’s the gun model I would propose.
by: Nyles Sturgent