I've heard that phallic symbol argument before, and always from ineffectual people driven to make everyone else as helpless as they are. who's more confused, those who think weapons are sexual organs, or those who want to take everyone's sexual organs away?.

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moments respite deserve only the end of a rope.

Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.

And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.

For the Second Amendment to do its job, the other side must become much better informed. I watched an action-adventure program last night that asserted that the famous AK-47 - the original peoples' rifle (and Authority's greatest mistake) - is rare in this country, and that the only ones here were originally smuggled in from the Middle East, or possibly from South America. The idiots who wrote this mess seemed unaware that after legal imports - mostly from China - were illegally cut off by executive order, they began to be manufactured here.

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bears arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason,then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.