Playing with guns

The second amendment to the Constitution was designed to ensure that our government would not become more powerful than its individuals. At the time, despotic rulers were not the exception, but the rule. And, after all, it was only by bloody luck and loaded weapons that our relatively small band of patriots fought off British tyranny. Without our muskets, we were slaves to the crown.

Could the framers have imagined a world with a nuclear arsenal? Or a world where unarmed students would be gunned down by National Guardsmen? Could they have foreseen a drug trade so mighty that children were supplied with automatic weapons to defend its turf?

Apparently, not.

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The best of times, the worst of times

So when it was all over, and our newborn daughter and her exhausted mother were both resting comfortably at last, I staggered down to the hospital coffee shop to get some fresh air, gather my wits and contemplate my new reality. Having spent most of the previous 24 hours insulated behind the doors of the labor/delivery ward, I picked up the morning paper to get some fresh news of the world into which my daughter had just arrived. The headlines on that April morning 15 years ago weren’t about new life and new possibilities, though. Instead, they detailed the gruesome results of the previous days’ storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, by Federal law enforcement personnel.

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