QotD: Guns

Following the recent election, and the well-deserved humiliating repudiation suffered by the right, television writers — no doubt anticipating even more Democratic victories — have begun interpreting the Constitution for those (their entire audience, they assume) too illiterate or stupid to read it for themselves. A recent episode of Criminal Minds, for example, had one of its FBI agents lecturing a character to the effect that a group he belonged to had more guns (three per person, as I recall) than the law gave them a right to possess.

Let's see. . . if you happen to own a rifle, a pistol, and, say, a shotgun — as different in their individual functions as a Beetle, a Vespa, and a Hummer, but who would expect a TV writer to know that? — and you decide to add a .22 of some kind to your "battery", then, according to the undercover Supreme Court justices who hack out this program anonymously in their spare time, you've exceeded a secret quota the Founding Fathers somehow wrote into the Second Amendment in microscopic, invisible Sanskrit along the raw edges of the original parchment.

Naughty, naughty.

We have to do something, and do it now, before it gets as bad again as it was in the bad old 60s, when every network "entertainment" show (we're talking Barnaby Jones, here, and Hawaii 5-0) had its obligatory "Guns Are Nasty" moment every week, and you could always tell who the badguy was gonna be, in advance, because he had weapons — and, gasp!, big game trophies — hanging on the wall behind his desk.

L. Neil Smith, "CSI, Retired?", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-02-25