Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I am attending continuing education classes, required for Minnesota lawyers. The legal profession has a serious diversity problem.
There are too many old white men at this conference, too few young hot chicks.
Nothing pleasant to look at, when the Power Point is boring.
Joe Doakes
Pretty sure its true most everywhere these days.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Gloomy, rainy day. I have things I should do, but don’t want to. I have things I want to do, but shouldn’t. So I’m sitting here, on-line, complaining about it.
OMG I’m becoming a Millennial.
Joe Doakes
The email’s from last week. But the sentiment – and millennial kvetching – is eternal.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A co-worker is leaving the office to take a new job. We’re all supposed to sign the card. I have trouble with them. I overthink the message to make sure it’s politically correct and inoffensive, yet sincere and heartfelt.
First I tried “I’m happy you’re leaving,” but maybe that should be re-written as “I’m happy you’re leaving the office to start a new career.” Maybe not.
I thought about “Good luck in your new job,” but that sounds like the implication is “you’re going to need it.”
The problem is, I’m a poor liar. I hate to say “I’m going to miss you,” when I’m not. I hate to say “you deserve it,” when you don’t.
Is there a training class for this? How to be more sincere liar? Where do the politicians get their lessons?
Joe doakes
Have at it, mind hive.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
When I was a kid, cars didn’t have seat belts. My Dad installed some and we thought they were a nuisance but I don’t have to listen to flight attendants, I know how to operate the buckle on a 1960-style seat belt.
I remember when George Bush the Elder was running for President, Doonesbury made fun of his support for air bags, calling them over-regulation (Google the cartoon for May 9, 1980).
I never used to think airbags and seat belts made much difference, I figured it was all a bunch of Ralph Nader hype. No longer. I’m a believer. My car is totaled but I walked away without a scratch (bruises, but no scratches).
Friday night about 9:45 pm, dark but clear skies and dry road, coming home from Wisconsin on Hwy 36, stopped for a red light at Century Avenue (the at-grade crossing just East of the snowman, the intersection with the Dairy Queen). I was in the right lane, last in a line of cars, sitting behind a Chevy Trailblazer. Wham! I got hit from behind. Never saw it coming. I don’t think I blacked out, but one moment I was looking at the truck ahead of me, the next moment there was no truck ahead of me and my car was slowly rolling toward the ditch, the windshield wiper was flapping, I could hear a car alarm behind me and smell smoke inside my car. I got my car stopped in the right turn lane before it rolled into the ditch, shut off the wiper, turned on the flashers, and sat there for a few seconds to gather my wits.
A passer-by pulled his car over in front of me, ran back to my car, and helped me get out because we didn’t know if the smoke meant my car was on fire. He helped me walk around the back of my car where I had to lay down on the edge of the road, my back hurt too much to stand. The ambulance came, cops came, I went to Regions Hospital for X-rays, the car went to the tow company’s storage lot, my wife rescued me from the hospital.
I have a sore back, sore rib, bruises on my knees where they must have hit the dash, and a big rash on my left bicep where it must have scraped the airbag. Oh yes, my airbags deployed (two of them, one in the steering wheel and one under the dash). That’s the smoke I smelled – they use a powder charge to propel the bag. No car fire.
The state trooper who gave me the PBT on the side of the road (I passed!) visited me at the hospital. He said the kids in the car that struck me were 19 years old and did not pass the test (passenger was .08 and driver was .01). They claimed the light was green, they were changing lanes, I was sitting in the road for no reason. The trooper took one look at my car and laughed at them. He said they never touched their brakes, no skid marks at all, they hit me at highway speed 55-60, and that’s why my trunk is all smashed in. They hit me so hard, the garage door opener hanging on the visor came loose but by the time it started to fall, my car had already moved forward so far that the garage door opener ended up in the back seat. The impact shoved my car into the back end of the Trailblazer hard enough to push my engine back a foot.
I asked the trooper if anybody else got hurt and he said no, the kids were fine and the guy in the Chevy ahead of me fled the scene. Another passer-by followed him and got a license plate. The trooper suspects that driver was drunk too, or uninsured, or had no license – some reason he didn’t want to talk to the cops.
There is no doubt in my mind the safety improvements built into my car saved me from serious injury. I was searing my seat belt with shoulder harness which stopped me from hitting the windshield. The driver’s headrest was properly adjusted to avoid whiplash. The airbags kept me from hitting the steering wheel. The crumple zones designed into the car’s frame soaked up the impact on both front and back.
KIDS! Wear your damned seat belts!
I’m stiff and sore but I’m going to be okay. Going to get ready for church now. Got a lot to be thankful for today. Take good care, everybody.
Joe Doakes
I’m a believer.
54 years ago this coming Monday, my mom was driving me around Jamestown in my dad’s old Mercury. It was a two-door – and folding front seats didn’t have seat locks. The dashboard was all metal, except where it was even more metal. Seatbelts? Forget about ’em.
This was also long before car seats. And I was a squirmy toddler who was standing up on the passenger-side back seat…
…when Mom slammed on the brakes when someone ran a stop light.
I still fairly clearly remember sailing over the folding back seat and face-planting into the all-metal glove box. I’m less clear on remembering the stitches that followed – six, I think – but the scar is there over my right eye to remind me.
What Joe said. Wear your seat belts. And stay sober when you drive.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
US currency is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
80% of all currency contains trace amounts of cocaine.
Possession of a trace amount of cocaine on currency in your pocket is a felony, regardless of how the cocaine got on the currency.
You are required to use our money, but you are prohibited from using our money. Catch 22. Look, people, that book was satire, not a guide to public policy. Fix the law.
Joe Doakes
To much of our administrative class, “everyone is an inadvertent felon” is a feature, not a bug.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
You know how you see a person and based on appearance and a few words, make up a story about that person in your mind? Maybe you don’t. I do.
I was at Cub, just walking up to the checkout (with actual cashier because I had more than 20 items). A woman came quickly from an aisle and almost beat me but my cart was ahead of her so she stopped short, holding her basket.
I said “You only have a few items, why don’t you go ahead” and she said “Thank you” and did. No problem, I’ve got time and she’s obviously in a hurry. I noticed she’s not wearing a wedding ring but lots of women don’t. 40-ish, very tanned, curly haired, could have been mixed race or could have recently returned from vacation or maybe she hits the tanning booth, none of my business.
So she checks out and starts bagging, I’m moving my cart to the end so I can bag when my stuff is done scanning, she’s talking to the casher. “Can I get the belt turned on?” I notice her stuff is only half-way down the conveyor to her. The clerk tells her to push the button but she says “I want it to move constantly.” It’s one of those padded black squares that you can push with your hip to make it move constantly. She wearing Spandex, not a silk dress. I’m thinking to myself: lean on it, lady, it’s not that hard.
So right away, I have this story in my mind. Pushy and not too bright. Teacher. Divorced. Spring break tan. Big hurry because her life matters. If I were to tell her “Hey, lady, we’ve all got somewhere to be, lighten up,” it’d be a giant insult and possibly a hate crime. I know it’s a complete fiction, a story that I made up in my head about someone I don’t know at all, but I’d be willing to bet I’m right about a lot of it.
Which goes to show why stereotypes are a good thing. They’re efficient. They allow us to skip all the tedious fact-gathering and elimination of possibilities so we can go straight to avoidance. It’s why Jesse Jackson is relieved to hear footsteps following him and find it’s an older White guy instead of a young Black guy.
I suppose it would be considerate of me to help other people write their own head-stories so they can more quickly begin avoidance and leave me alone. Where can I get a MAGA cap?
Joe Doakes
This is more common than people thi…
…OK – it’s more common than people think, as I personally imagine them thinking.
One of the reasons I’m such a yuge fan of Dennis Prager is his weekly “Happiness Hour” – in which he talks not only about the practice and moral imperative of being happy (hint: it’s not just for you), but about the struggle to become happy.
One of his sayings, and his advice, on the subject comes close to an old Hungarian saying I’ve been fond of most of my adult life; “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”. Prager notes that this basic philosophy applies to so very much in life – about getting in shape, about falling or staying in love with one’s partner, and of course happiness.
There’s some science to the premise as well. There’s a reason that disciplines from music to the military drill one endlessly on things they want to impress into the human brain – because almost nobody plays a piano scale or a guitar chord or clears a rifle jam automatically or intuitively. But if you drill on them often enough, they become what people call “second nature”, because your brain develops space – neural pathways – for them.
Happiness works a little like that. Not entirely – being happy isn’t quite as easy as playing a first-position “F” chord – but the idea of wiring the brain to be something isn’t all that conceptually different.
I believe you can push yourself toward happiness. There’s some science, not to mention thousands of years of human experience, to support the premise. It’s basic cognitive psychology.
And since one can wire one’s brain to be many good things via practice – a musician, a soldier, a happy person, whatever – it stands to reason you can do the same with unhappy, useless, miserable, depressing things.
Having raised, and working with roomful of, millennials, I’ve observed that the generation seems to collect psychological and psychiatric maladies in young adulthood the same way they used to collect Pokemon cards in childhood. “I’ve got mild self-diagosed bipolar, which beats your dysthymia and separation anxiety!”.
Modern academia and media preach some miserable stuff to the kids; a common refrain among the young ‘uns is what a miserable world the “boomers” “left” them, with the misery being expressed in terms of climate change, the changing economy and, er, Trump.
And the few times I engage on the subject I mention that I can kind of relate – when I was a kid, the worries were nuclear war and overpopulation. Of course, there actually were nuclear weapons all about the place, including 25 miles from my hometown, and there were still famines happening. The nukes are mostly gone, and the obesity is a bigger problem among the poor than famine for the first time in human history.
And our presidents – Nixon and Carter – actually were corrupt and incompetent (respecively). So compared with the world I grew up in, my kids have it pretty decent.
But I digress.
I thought about the way the world – academia, entertainment, the media – seem to be wiring the younger generation to be a bunch of dysfunctional, whiny mopes when I read this sad, pathetic story about a guy of color who dumped his perfectly good white girlfriend because, well, read the story.
Or don’t. Maybe you’ll be happier if your brain doesn’t rewire itself just a little bit wrong with that little bit of dysfunction.
Or make yourself a little happier by considering that if this is all the younger generation has to fret about, we’ve done a good job.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
We need universal background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, like these.
***
When politicians are spending taxpayer dollars, they have a moral obligation to get the most value for their money. In olden days, that meant “cheapest price” but nowadays, it means “promotes social justice” which is why they have quotas for minority-owned and female-owned businesses that can’t compete on price. Oddly, the school district is short of money, which couldn’t possibly have anything to do with intentionally overpaying for goods and services, could it?
***
I’m confused by this protest at the police station. What, specifically, is the solution they demand?
- Police should prove the shooting was justified? They will, in good time. So why march today?
- It doesn’t matter whether the police say the shooting was justified, shooting members of specific racial or tribal groups is never justified, ever, at any time for any reason, not even in self-defense! Okay, so why march at the police station today, why not lobby the legislature for new law exempting certain groups from being arrested when they shoot up apartment buildings?
- Police shouldn’t shoot anybody, ever, at any time for any reason, not even in self-defense! Okay, so why march at the police station, why not lobby the Mayor and City Council to disarm all cops. Take guns out of officer’s hands, no more officer-involved shootings. Simple.
I’d love to get on board with the protest but I can’t figure out what we’re protesting for. Shouldn’t I know that before I hit the bricks?
Pfft. All that matters is that you show up when told.
…you see a “News” story on social media, and find yourself looking for a byline from “the Onion”or “Babylon Bee”, and you don’t see it, and you realize the real world is starting to become more like Facebook rather than the other way around.
Let’s take a quick pause and feel good about humanity for a moment or two.
On the one hand, few stories have cranked my claustrophobia to 11 quite like the story of the Thai boys trapped in a cave for…
…gulp…
…two weeks.
But as this is written, the staggeringly tricky rescue is finally underway:
Senior officials told Reuters and AFP that six boys had been rescued, but this could not be confirmed.
Rescuers will now need another 10 to 12 hours to get ready for the next stage of the remarkable operation, Narongsak said..
The plan is to take the rest of the group out in batches of four within two days according to the Journal.
All of the rescued were examined and found to be in good health, according to local outlet The Nation.
The governor confirmed this, saying the health of the four boys is “perfect.”
Another local outlet, Kahosod English, said one of the rescued soccer players was being “closely monitored.”
The Thai Navy Seals posted on their Facebook page that four of the boys had been rescued.
Am I the only one who thinks “well, this is the 21st century” on learning the Thai SEALS have a website?
And of course, in a world that venerates vacuous celebrity, it’s elevating to know that the world still has some real heroes
Sgt. Major Saman Gunan wasn’t abiding by any orders when he joined the effort to rescue a boys soccer team trapped in a cave in northern Thailand. The 38-year-old retired Thai Navy SEAL did so by choice.
Gunan, who was working as a volunteer, passed out underwater during an overnight mission placing extra air tanks inside the cave, along the route divers use to reach the cavern where the 12 boys and their coach remain stranded and the oxygen in the air is depleting. He couldn’t be revived and was confirmed dead early Friday morning, according to Thai officials.
Hopefully this story will be over, with a happy ending, today.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The story of how the court can seize a person’s guns based on one quip alone is bad enough, but I have two more thoughts:
When the cops seize your guns, do they run the serial numbers to see if they’re stolen; or test-fire them and run ballistics to see if they were used in a crime? If not, why not; and if so, what happens to the value of your never-fired-new-in-the-box John Wayne Peacemaker when they fire it and who makes good on that?
Second, assume the Liberal psychological explanation is correct – gun owners are compensating for having a small penis. In that case, taking away my guns would be physiological castration. If I were a gun owner considering seeking mental health treatment but the price I’d have to pay would be castration, you can forget about it.
“But it’s for your own good.” That’s what they told the tomcat. He didn’t like it either, but he had no choice. I do. If you want to reduce the number of men killing themselves with guns, you must find an incentive for them to accept treatment. Loss of manhood is not it.
Joe Doakes
Put it another way: even back in the seventies, psychologists (in general) knew that telling homosexual children to not act gay was profoundly psychologically damaging; telling someone “don’t be what you are” is an invite for decades of misery.
Fair enough.
“Defend myself, those who depend on me, and my community” is as we discussed the other day a primary evolutionary imperative for men, and firearms are almost always the best way to do that. Forget about japes about penis size – those are for people who are compensating for lousy comedic chops. Disarming someone is an attack on what evolution tells them to be.
What could go wrong?
..and I”m taking a long weekend, myself.
With that in mind, I’ll urge you to listen, as I do this time every year, to Reverend King’s final, and in some ways most iconic, speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop”.
“I Have A Dream”, full of vigor and hope, gets all the headlines; “Mountaintop” is both more sober and more expansive; it focuses on the stump-pulling work of the battle for civil rights. It has lessons for those who fight for all civil rights.
As always, the whole thing is worth a listen.
Manny Laureano – principal trumpeter for the Minnesota Orchestra, and a longtime friend of this blog and me personally – went back to his native Puerto Rico. Nothing new there – he goes back roughly once a year.
It’s a little different this time – it’s his first visit since hurricane Maria.
Manny’s got a blog, now, and yesterday he published the first of many parts of his account of his trip home. Check the whole thing out.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Liberals insist people are basically good. If the cops laid down their guns, then the criminals would see there’s no need to be armed so they’d lay down their guns, too. The world would be a better place if we got rid of the nasty guns.
That’s a lovely vision but it depends on the validity of the underlying assumption: are people basically good? Can we depend on them to be kind and generous and helpful in a crisis, when normal societal constraints are gone? Is there any recent empirical evidence to answer the question?
Houston hurricane – looters. Miami hurricane – looters. Puerto Rico hurricane – looters. Wildfires in California – looters.
Joe Doakes
And it’s not just “progressives”. “Anarchist” libertarianism can only exist with the complete repeal of human nature.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
There is a crisis. People who are prescribed drugs containing opioids can become addicted to them.
There is a problem. People who receive medical treatment have privacy rights. We don’t know who’s doing the prescribing, who’s doctor-shopping, who’s obtaining prescriptions only to sell them.
There are proposed solutions, but they’re mostly paperwork regulations that have no more effect on real-world issues than putting up a Drug Free Zone sign on a schoolhouse door. More warning labels won’t help: people take the medicine doctors prescribe because we trust doctors. Restricting prescriptions won’t solve the end problem: no doctor prescribes heroin and people who self-medicate their personal problems with drugs will obtain them illegally, as they always have. Adding a new federal registry of sensitive information on individuals – does the word “Equifax” ring any bells?
“Opioid” is simply the new word for “narcotic” which has been a staple in the War on Drugs since Coke took cocaine out of its soft-drink 100 years ago. The problem isn’t the tool, the problem is the tool user.
Joe Doakes
As with any plan, philosophy, worldview or kind of government – the problem is people.
Being able to disagree is a dying art – and a vital one:
To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community. But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. G
Diagreeing civilly and productively is what makes representative government possible. We’re losing that ability.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m considered a “Boomer” because my birth date is before the arbitrary cut-off in 1964; but by the time I reached each new stage in life, the older Boomers already had been there and ravaged it, like locusts. I was about 5 years too late for everything, which makes me feel less like a Boomer and more like one of the next generation.
What’s it do to a nation when you believe your generation has no future, that the people before you squandered it?
Joe Doakes
I’m probably in the same boat as Joe. The arbitrary date cutoff is wrong, of course; “Baby Boomers” are the children of people who came home from the war and started having kids. As my parents were 9 and 5 on VJ day, that just wasn’t the case. And if I were a Baby Boomer, perhaps I’d remember more about the Beatles than hearing they’d broken up on the radio.
Anyway – what does it do for a nation, believing that the previous generation squandered your future? Good question. I’m looking at Millennials – say, at Evergreen State – and wondering if they’re going to squander my legacy.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If IQ exists (which SJWs debate but serious researchers do not), then the Theory of Evolution through Survival of the Fittest would suggest that average IQ was higher in the past. It must have been – only the people clever enough to survive, lived long enough to reproduce.
Nowadays, with endless help groups and support networks and government programs, people who would have starved to death in the past are now surviving and breeding, as are their children. The inevitable result must be a general lowering of IQ. It’s not your imagination – people really are getting dumber every year.
Imagine that a new Black Death or Spanish Flu kills off 70% of the world’s population. Would the survivors be smart enough to rebuild? Or would our civilization disappear, to be discovered centuries from now as stone ruins deep in some jungle where St. Paul used to be?
Joe Doakes
In a semi-related matter, I’ve had a piece in my “drafts” folder for a few months now about how The Walking Dead is the most conservative thing Hollywood has produced in a generation.
I may have to finish it.
I’m just going to leave you with this story today.
Autocorrect mixed blessing. Especially with voice-to-text – which has caused me a problem or two on this blog over the past couple years.
But I’m reminded…
…there’s an upside
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There’s a reason the United States considers cyber warfare to be a weapon of mass destruction, same as nuclear weapons: because of the massive damage it can cause to modern civilization.
Mitch wrote recently about a grid-down scenario from EMP attack. How about grid-down event caused by ramsomware? How secure are the computers that serve the national electrical grid?
If the Twin Cities were without power to scan groceries, to accept debit cards, to pump gas, to run air conditioners and elevators, to listen to the news or surf the web or communicate on cell phones . . . how long would it be before hooligans started breaking windows and homeowners started loading shotguns to protect their families?
You do have a shotgun, don’t you? And several weeks of food and water? A medical kit. Propane or charcoal for the grill.
Joe Doakes
My plan is to become a warlord.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Where did Americans get the assumption that if I work in the same office with other people, they’re automatically bosom buddies entitled to know everything about my life, and entitled to regale me with humorous anecdotes about every detail of their lives?
If I wanted to know about your kid’s Cub Scout dinner last night, I would have asked. If I wanted you to know the details of my weekend, I would have told you.
Am I a curmudgeon, or is everybody else a gasbag? Or both?
I asked a friend who said: “Yes, you are a curmudgeon. The other people are being sociable. They are assuming (apparently incorrectly) that you are socially engaged with those around you. It’s a social contract. When trapped in an elevator or mine shaft or cube farm for 8 hours, you talk a little. You work in a government bureaucracy, so your social contract requires even more talking, plus loafing, web surfing, coffee drinking and paper shuffling. There are other rules the social contract. You are not required to engage in certain topics, for example. Although that’s where the problems tend to arise these days since under the new and improved version of the social construct you are expected to be diverse, agreeing with the Liberal mantra at every opportunity in your own unique way. That’s something you’re no good at; hence, the curmudgeon label. You should work from home making millions in your spare time, I see ads for those jobs every day.”
I suppose he’s right. Only 13 years until I can retire.
Joe Doakes
I’ve become very thankful that I get to work from home.
You’d do well to read this entire article by Kevin Williamson – about the real source of human achievement.
Hint: its not politics, or politicians:
Politics thrives on convincing us that things are worse than they are, telling us that we must live in fear of violence and misery if we do not elevate the members of a very special caste of people who do very little resembling real work. The contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton is not only unworthy of us as Americans — it is unworthy of us as a species. We contain within us greatness and the seeds of greatness, and the belief that the affairs of this free, dynamic, prosperous, good, unprecedented republic of 319 million souls rests on the choice between Enfeebled Psychotic Miscreant A and Enfeebled Psychotic Miscreant B is a superstition, one that we should leave behind.
And the conclusion?
Even the best of them do not represent the best of us. They can do some good, mainly by protecting property and the freedom to trade, organizing the occasional public good here and there, while otherwise staying out of the way. We — we human beings — cut global poverty in half in 30 years, built an ever-expanding electronic Library of Alexandria and have connected (so far) about half of the world’s population to it, all but eradicated polio, and saw the average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa grow by 70 percent in 50 years. What’s next?
You could do worse than to read the whole thing.
I’m not going to talk politics, here. I’m going to talk morality and ethics.
First: as a general rule, it’s considered immoral to make someone accountable and responsible for something, but to withhold the rights needed to carry that responsibility out. It’d be wrong to say “raise this kid!” without giving someone the rights to, y’know, raise the kid.
Right?
Second: If someone said to you “I have the right not to be hit by a tornado”, you’d think they were nuts – right? Your rights don’t affect nature – do they?
Likewise, if someone said “I have a right not to get hurt while driving”, you’d likely respond “there is no “right” to be exempt from bad luck, equipment failure, or even human negligence – your own, or someone else’s”.
No – in both cases, you have the *responsibilty* to protect yourself, and especially your family, from these dangers that nature, technology and human nature throw at you. You listen to the sirens and haul the kids down to the basement; you check your tires, you make sure your kids are belted in, and yourself to boot; you watch for drivers who seem impaired or reckless, and drive defensively. You have the *right* to take action to meet your responsibility to *avoid* having human nature, mechanical nature, or Mother Nature harm you and yours.
So in this past week and a half, since the atrocity in Orlando, a lot of people have been arguing about the Second Amendment. One line I’ve heard a lot is “your Second Amendment right doesn’t trump my right not to get shot!”, usually from people who think they’re making a show-stopper point.
They’re half right; the Second Amendment trumps nothing. Literally. Because there *is* no “right not to get shot”. There is only a responsibility to try to deter, deflect or end threats to your community, to you, and your family.
Like Mother Nature, human nature is full of ugly surprises and perversions; people who want to take what’s not theirs (criminals), people who think that violence is a means to a political end (terrorists), some who think killing is their ticket to immortality (rampage killers) and, every so often, someone who thinks their will to power is more important than your life, liberty and happiness; none of them have the “right” to do any of it, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing it anyway.
Do you have a “right” not to be affected by the worst human nature has to offer? In an abstract sense, maybe – but discussions of “rights” with criminals, terrorists, madmen and tyrants are about as useful as discussions with tornados and flat tires.
You don’t have a “right” not to be affected by perversions of human nature, any more than you have a right not to be affected by tornados, earthquakes or blowouts. But you do have that responsibility.
To meet that responsibility, you have rights; the right to take actions that protect everyone; you don’t need a permit to check your tires, to take your kids to the basement when the sirens go off [1]…
…and the *right* to defend you and yours from the worst of human nature with a firearm (among many, many other options – from speech, peer pressure and dogs, to locked doors and motion lights, through restraining orders, police calls and the like). The Second Amendment doesn’t grant this right; our creator did, just like our rights to speak, worship, publish, and so on. To try to suppress that right – the right to uphold that responsibility to protect ones self, community and family – is as immoral as giving people any other responsibility without rights.
There is no more “right not to get shot” than there is a “right to shoot people” [2].
——
OK, I lied. There’s some politics in here too.
Some people who should know better have been given to stroking their chins and intoning “y’know, the 2nd Amendment exists and is a right – but we’ve rolled back other rights, like the right to own slaves”.
Sure – we’ve changed the Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished the “right” to own other humans – an institution that was morally repugnant BECAUSE it stripped away the other human’s rights. Basic principle, here: one person’s rights can not infringe other peoples’ rights.
But abolishing the Second Amendment – or more likely, trying to ban a class of firearms – has less in common with the 13th Amendment than the 18th, which banned alcohol. Like Prohibition, the gun grabbers believe that if they just regulate what people can get their hands on, they can repeal human nature itself!
Prohibition made everything that it was trying to help, even worse, and had unintended consequences that were far worse than the original problem (all-time high crime rates, ballooning government spending, contempt for the law).
Naturally, this’ll be different.
Anyway – you don’t, ever, get more freedom by taking other peoples’ freedom away.
[1] although don’t give the Saint Paul DFL any ideas
[2] other than in self-defense, naturally