Letter to the Editor: Bad sentence
BY David W. Porter, Skiatook
Thursday, January 03, 2013
1/03/13 at 3:48 AM
Our Second Amendment ("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.") is one of the most poorly written sentences ever published in the English language. What do militias have to do with the ever ongoing controversy?
Aside from the poor English, when it was adopted in 1789, the only arms were muzzle loading. Cartridges, machine guns, automatic weapons, high-capacity clips, bazookas, nuclear arms, etc., did not exist.
An atomic bomb is an armament. So, is it OK for me to have an atomic bomb in my garage? If not, where along this line of progressively more lethal arms and accessories should we draw the line?
What we should do is repeal this amendment and replace it with one that considers current technology and spells out in plain English what is and is not acceptable.
The time is right to tackle this contentious issue.
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