We say again that we agree with the late former Justice John Paul Stevens, who, four years ago, stated in an op-ed piece in the New York Times that he favored repeal of the Second Amendment because of its anachronistic relationship to modern society, having been ratified in 1791 at a time when the country was largely a frontier, where provender had to be either directly hunted and killed or grown, and where there were forces in the wilderness, bereft, outside the towns and cities, of any strong law enforcement, necessitating each settler on the frontier therefore to be armed against those threatening forces, whether they were man or beast. Those concerns, except in the most remote parts of the country, are no longer with us, and there is really no excuse for maintaining the "right to bear arms", which obviously was intended to be for the sole purpose of raising a "well regulated" militia. Anyone these days who claims otherwise is not only stupid and ridiculous, but is a heartless bastard, and if they be judges or legislators, should be forthwith removed from the bench or legislature by whatever peaceful and democratic means available to the people.

We cannot grieve as a nation for strangers practically every other day of every other week, every time some person picks up a gun and decides to shoot one or more people, either someone they know or someone who is a perfect stranger, for no apparent reason, the result each time being the same tired television litany, with reporters and legislators, more often than not, not getting to the heart of the problem amid the heartfelt sympathies of the moment for the families of victims. The solution is to do away with guns, not to pass laws to try to predict who might become a problem with a gun, such "red flag" laws only to invite abuse by people who bear petty grudges against their neighbors or relatives, leading to absurd situations involving so much time of the courts that they will begin issuing rubber stamp approvals of the categorization, branding people, making the situation even worse, developing a caste of untouchable persons in the society, labeled troublemakers and dangerous to themselves or others, alienating those individuals from society and causing them, especially the young and immature, potentially to become troublemakers when, had they been left alone, might have grown out of whatever it was ailing them of the moment, or, perhaps, were never a troublemaker in the first place, but were simply sought to be branded as such by someone with a minor grievance, possibly the grudge-holder being the actual troublemaker. So we do not support "red flag" laws at all, of any type, as there are enough such stupid laws already on the books regarding terrorists and domestic violence and all sorts of such issues, which are never fully adjudicated with due process rights afforded the accused or resort available, in the case of proven false accusation, to either criminal prosecution of the false accuser or a civil defamation claim, leaving people with stained reputations, sometimes for the rest of their lives when in fact they did nothing. Such preemptive laws are laws for fascist societies, not the United States. Democrats who are proposing such laws need to stop and think. There are better and more responsible solutions.

As to the rest of the proposed stricter legislation, of course, we need far more restraints on the ability of someone to purchase firearms of any type and, moreover, the ammunition for those firearms—all firearms, not just assault weapons.

But there will be no real solution until we get rid of the Second Amendment completely and re-educate the society, from the first grade forward, to the fact that we do not need guns, that a gun is a sign of a weak, cowardly person, a brain-dead idiot, regardless of education, who has not sat down and really thought about modern society, where they are in time, that we no longer live on the wild frontier with Davy Crockett, that we do not need a gun of any sort to protect ourselves or others around us, that the gun is more likely to be used to injure ourselves or others than it is to protect us, and, on balance, therefore should be thrown in the ocean, or turned over to the police. That is where we need to go as a society, as all of the gun control laws in the world are not going to prevent the determined shooter from shooting someone or a mass of unsuspecting people. We need to reorient the entire society to a new way of thinking about the evil, the inherent evil, of any gun, unless it is being carried by the armed forces for the common defense of the nation or law enforcement for the common defense of a community, those being the equivalent of a "well regulated" militia, the amendment having been phrased at a time when there was no standing army.

In this regard, some charlatan we ran across on YouTube, a person who brags about being "louder" than everyone else, claims that the Founders were not dealing only with musketry, that there were in fact all kinds of guns capable of rapid, multiple fire available in colonial times, something he undoubtedly discovered through casual perusal, sans contextual thought, of Wicked-pedia or its equivalent, and that the Founders, therefore, must have had those guns in mind when drafting and passing on for ratification the Second Amendment, never once considering that the Revolution was fought, insofar as personally borne firearms, only with muskets, not with the forerunner of the Gatling gun or its equivalent, those weapons having had the inevitable drawback of being too expensive to manufacture and too costly to purchase for mass use, too heavy and cumbersome to carry into battle, limited in mobility to foot or horse, even wagons and carriages being few and far between in colonial times with the state of roads in primitive condition, and that such weapons were notoriously inefficient, unable to dissipate heat properly in rapid fire, more apt to kill the user than any target, thus relegated to novelty status, museum pieces from their introduction, toys of the wealthy, certainly not employed by any militia, never coming into general usage until the development of the Thompson submachine gun in 1918, originally intended for use in World War I against the Germans, taken over notoriously, after the war and the passage and ratification of the Prohibition amendment, by the gangs of Chicago and others bent on cornering, rata-ta-tat-ta-ta-ta-tat, the market on illicit speakeasies, shooting their way into accumulation of wealth and securing their "way of life" from interdiction by law enforcement, while acquiring payoff for their protection offered the small business owner, movies about which in later years having attracted a whole younger generation of boobs to that "way of life" played out, not on the stage, but rather with real guns, either in revivification of actual gangs of urban or rural origins, the latter to protect the modern equivalent of backwoods moonshining practices, drug labs, or in semi-make-believe as weekend warriors out in the woods, reliving what they fancy their great-great-granddaddies must have done out in them woods when the Injuns or the Yankees were a-threatenin' their "way of life"—speaking of which, one cannot ignore the inclusion by Thomas Jefferson in the above-linked 1824 letter of "freedom of person", which would have to include, in addition to the inherent right of freedom of unencumbered travel within the country, the right of privacy, as embodied in the Fourth Amendment, inexorably implying, via the Ninth Amendment and due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the right to be free from governmental deprivation of liberty without due process of law, the right of a woman to choose whether to terminate her own pregnancy prior to viability of the fetus, a part of her own body, dependent for its survival on the mother until reaching the point of viability, the point at which, by medical definition, it can survive outside the womb. As procedural due process entails, at minimum, the rights to have accusations stated with particularity, to confront and cross-examine accusers and to present evidence in one's own behalf in a hearing before an impartial fact-finder, where, we might ask, absent the protections enunciated under Roe v. Wade and its progeny, in the process of a state purporting to take away that basic human liberty, on the pretextual notion of asserting the state's police powers over protection of life of an unborn fetus which has not yet become viable, is the due process protection of the mother, such that she should be afforded an individual judicial hearing forthwith, as time is of the essence in pregnancy, before being denied her liberty interest in making the choice over her own body to terminate the pregnancy? You do see where overruling Roe and leaving the matter to each state will lead, don't you? Indeed, it would not be out of line for a woman, so constrained in the end to bear to term a child, to sue the state for its lifetime maintenance and support, including its higher education, under 42 USC 1983 for violation of her civil rights under color of state law, perhaps creatively utilizing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in addition to the constitutional right to privacy enunciated by Griswold v. Connecticut, irrespective of any overruling of Roe, that prospect leading only, in any event, to repeated individual litigation challenging state laws on restricting pre-viability abortion for decades to come, until, on one fine and glorious spring day, the present politically constructed Supreme Court majority, not responsive to the people or established law but rather only to the winds of transitory politics, goes the way of all such majorities. But we digress somewhat.

In modern times, you are a coward, an inherent coward, if you own or possess a firearm for any other purpose than being in law enforcement, true law enforcement, employed by a proper law enforcement agency, or in the military. And unless we reorient the nation to those basic facts, we will never again be truly safe in the society. Indiscriminate mass shootings in the country have gone on periodically for a long time, since at least right after World War II, gaining particular notoriety with the incident in August, 1966, in which Charles Whitman killed 14 people from the top of the tower of the Main Building on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, after having killed his mother and his wife earlier that day. In the wake of that incident and the assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963, and Senator Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, a law was passed to restrict the sale by mail of handguns and rifles. That, plus enhanced security, has largely, since 1968, prevented political assassinations in the country or their attempts, but obviously something more must occur before the society will finally eliminate the consistent violence against either individuals or masses of people by handguns and assault rifles or any other form of firearm, an assault on the sensibilities of every American and visitor to the country which has been occurring on a fairly routine basis since about 1979. We are all, in that sense, victims of gun violence, and, recognized or not, the subconscious awareness of the threat impacts our daily routines, even if consciously we have put it completely from our minds when we go shopping or to work or school. The possibility is always there.

It is, of course, stupid and insensitive to suggest that preventing school shootings can be accomplished by keeping all doors to the school, save one, locked, and even more ludicrous to suggest that arming teachers would be a reasonable solution. (For starters, where, with all the doors locked all day, do the children play, indoors, as if every day were a cold, rainy day? Where do they play football, baseball, soccer, in a gym? School systems do not have the money to build the elaborate indoor recreation facilities for each school which major college football programs have. And no active, healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 wants to stay indoors all day for six to seven hours at a stretch on a nice fall or spring day, hardly conducive to concentration and learning in any event, with the rustling fall leaves or the budding of the flowers beckoning one into nature. So, you build around the school grounds high walls, topped with barbed wire, with armed guards at each corner? Worried about access via ladders? Maybe also construct a moat with a drawbridge leading to the entrance of the walled off schoolyard? Or make the medieval picture complete by equipage of each student with a knight's helmet, shield, armor and lance?) Those are unthinking suggestions which ignore the basic problem, that easy access to guns and a mentality in the society which basically approves of guns and depicts the gun-toter as having somehow greater strength and exhibiting more rugged individualism, perhaps even the utterly stupid belief that the gun-toter might have a bigger sexual device, than the person without a gun, encourages the mindset that resort to gun violence to settle disputes and arguments is acceptable and traditional in the country, and that without it, there is even an absence of patriotism—a view which ignores the country's actual history and overemphasizes the relatively brief period of about forty years of westward expansion over the prairies, largely over by the 1890's.

Get rid of your cowardly guns. Make it plain in every movie, and in every television program, in every advertisement having anything to do with firearms, that they are the instruments of cowards, and will not protect the possessor from anything, will only lead that person to his or her own self-destruction, one way or the other. And that goes for the goddamned hunters, as well.

Repeal the Second Amendment. Then, we might actually make a start on a new day, free of goddamned guns, a society which values again, as did our Founders, free speech over goddamned guns. We have said it before, and we shall say it again, that there should be laws passed at the Federal level and in every state making it a felony, punishable by a minimum of ten years in prison, for mere possession in a public place of any firearm, unless you are a member of the military or a law enforcement officer. The only responsible movement is one toward repeal of the Second Amendment, and, in the meantime, to undertake a re-education of the society regarding not whether one should have a gun but why one should never own or possess one in modern times.

And by the way, fat boy on the old folks' walker, we shall tell you who the "sick son of a bitch" is. Just ask us. Make our day...

A letter from the chairman of the "Show Committee" of the Charlotte Coin Club thanks the newspaper for its coverage of the club's exhibition held in the Union National Bank during the previous two weeks, helping to make the show a success.