Thinking Real hard... about getting a bang stick of my own.

Machiavelli Was Right
by Charley Reese

Niccol� Machiavelli, who was a sort of Karl Rove of his day, though with more integrity, said of the Swiss that they were "the most free and most armed people" of Europe. Get it? The connection between arms and freedom?

That statement is still true of the Swiss. Many people know that they practice neutrality, but not many know that they practice armed neutrality. If the gun controllers' claim that the mere presence of arms leads to mayhem were true, the Swiss would have wiped themselves out years ago. There are guns and gun ranges all over the place. You would be hard-pressed to find a Swiss home without a firearm and ammunition. Yet, the Swiss have a very low crime rate.

If you were a robber or a rapist, who would you rather have as a victim? Someone who is armed, or someone who is defenseless? Even a stupid criminal knows the answer to that question.

If the police can protect us � which is another claim the gun-control people make � then why are so many people murdered, raped and robbed? Even the television fictional stories tell you the answer to that. The cops get there after the crime has been committed. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a crime scene. Nearly all the cop shows open with the police looking at a dead, unarmed body.

Do you really believe that the men who had just fought a long and bloody war against the British and were writing what we call the Bill of Rights had this conversation:

"Well, let's see. We've guaranteed freedom of assembly, of religion, of speech and of the press. Oh, my gosh, we've forgotten the duck hunters. They'll raise heck if we leave them out, so we'd better write an amendment for them."

The Second Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with hunting. It states: "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."

The men who wrote these amendments were pretty darn fluent in English. If they had intended the right to keep and bear arms to apply only to the militia, they would have said so. They would have written "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the states to arm their respective militias shall not be infringed."

They didn't say that. The main sentence says "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." "People" means everybody, not just the members of the militia. The subordinate clause, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," just gives one, but not the only, reason why all the people have a right to keep and bear arms. The militia, after all, was drawn from the people. It was not the Army. The first meaning of "bear," by the way, is to carry, bring or take. Americans have the right to keep arms and to carry them.

The word "regulate" in those days meant trained, and do you notice again the connection between arms and freedom? The subordinate clause refers to a "free state." Obviously, an unfree state would not allow the people to be armed.

The Founding Fathers were not urban neurotics like so many of today's politicians. They were almost all outdoor people. Guns were to them just tools, like their axes or plows. You couldn't survive in the wilderness without firearms, and at the time of our Revolution, there were only about 3 million people from Maine to Georgia.

Nor were there any police forces. There was no Secret Service, FBI or any of the other alphabet law-enforcement agencies. If you decided to travel, you traveled at your own risk, and you can bet people traveled armed. When I was last at Williamsburg, Va., they had a room in one of the historical houses arranged as if a traveler had just arrived and unpacked. There on top of a dresser was a pistol.



June 7, 2008

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

So if some kid is playing with a gun and kills himself, would you call it an accident, or a lack of education.

Depends on the circumstances surrounding the incident.

Gee, at that point, wouldn't it be a little late to go for a gun? Besides, a gun's connected to a hand, which is connected to a wrist, which is connected to an arm...if I can disarm a guy trying to knife me in a bar, I can probably disarm a gun-toter.

just remember, it is often a fatal mistake to take a non-lethat weapon to a gun fight

That's assuming he is close enough to you...a knife you have to be in close range..a gun not so much...

lack of education...
I'm a middle child of TEN kids, I grew up with guns and learned to respect them at a very young age, i passed my Gun-safety course at the age of nine. We never had any incidents...my dad kept them locked up in his closet..in a safe. We couldn't play with them even if we had tried

Yesterday a 4 year old made our news. He shot his 2 yr. old brother with a gun that the father had in an area that the children weren't allowed to go. The father may go to jail.

My mother was shot in a freak accident when she was a child.
My grandfather had been hunting. He just got back and thought that all of the bullets had been taken out.

My uncle was playing on the back porch with a bow and arrow except the arrow was a ruler. He shot the ruler thru a hole in the screen door. The ruler hit the trigger of a gun inside.

The gun went off and the bullet went into my mother's stomach.

Sh*t happens when they are guns in the house.

i'm sorry, but in every instance it was lack of respect for the weapons...i don't EVEN put my guns away..until after i have emptied them, triple checked, cleaned the barrel, put a lock through the slide, and then put them in a safe with a lock...keys are kept in two seperate areas...the one for the slide is in my wallet...which is always on me...and the other one for the safe is hiddden very well in a seperate closet then the guns are kept in.

It's so obvious. The worst criminals of all gather in DC & are very afraid of armed citizens ruining their evil plans to take over the world. They don't care about the petty thugs on the street raping & killing those they are supposed to be serving.

They have to be able to HIT you...you'd be surprised how many people miss at distances of less than 10 feet.

there are a few...i just haven't met any yet that are that bad with a gun...dang it, your making me want to drive up to the desert to go shooting

I have no problem with people owning guns.

But here is the problem and I've seen it time and time again.

A person breaks into your home. You get your gun and shoot the person to protect yourself. Then the authorities come and you have to convince them as to why you thought you were justified in shooting that person. And if you aren't convincing enough, or if they thought you could of done things differently, then you become criminal, and the criminal becomes the victim.

So what's the point of having a gun to protect yourself if you are going to have to defend your reasons for using it in the end?

no problem...just get rid of the body....FAST!

Good idea.

Human beings aren't perfect. They make mistakes. Mistakes occur even more often when people are tired. It is especially easy to make a mistake when children are distracting a person.

My grandfather was a hunter. He cleaned and took care of his guns. But..nobody is perfect ALL of the time and he made a mistake.

I would like to add that a weapon can be taken away from the victim and then used on the victim.

Already have them..carry at all times. After everything that has happened surrounding my husband's death- no one will keep me from carrying!!

I never want my child to play in a house that has guns. Accidents happen. I don't know how careful those guns are taken care of by the parents.

If it makes any difference, I have handled guns before. I took a Rifle and Pistol Range class in college.