By Joel Bowman, on February 19th, 2018% 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.”
When it came to the Second Amendment, those who wrote the Constitution had this in mind:
Given their concerns at the time, it’s easy to see their reasons for including the Second Amendment in the Constitution. They were not sufficiently prescient to envision the AR-15. It’s cousin, the M-16, was the weapon U.S. soldiers carried in Vietnam. The M-16 is fully automatic (pull the trigger, and it fires several rounds), whereas . . . → Read More: Second Amendment Blues
By Joel Bowman, on October 7th, 2017% Just when I had essentially become numb to our current political situation, Las Vegas exploded in chaos as a result of a a planned attack of automatic weapons fire. Las Vegas was not the first mass shooting in US history. Here’s a brief (and limited) list: “The Top 10. Mass shootings, of course, are not the only gun deaths in the States. The US holds the world record for gun deaths not related to the carnage of war.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution actually encourages gun ownership, primarily for citizens involved in a well-regulated militia. What the Framers . . . → Read More: Where to Begin
By Joel Bowman, on February 6th, 2015% I am old enough that I had most of the childhood illnesses for which vaccines are now available. I had both kinds of measles, chicken pox, mumps, and (I believe) whooping cough. I did have a number of vaccinations as a child, including small pox, tetanus, and probably some others. In my early 20s, I was among those who took the first version of the vaccine for polio developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. When I was in the Army, all new recruits were vaccinated against everything for which vaccines were available, including plague, probably in anticipation of our being sent . . . → Read More: The Vaccine Wars
By Joel Bowman, on September 15th, 2013% Some of you have noticed that it has been a long time since my last post. It isn’t so much that I had nothing to say as it is that I was overwhelmed by how much needed saying. A lot has been going on, and even areas where not much has been happening (the U.S. Congress), the inaction is fraught with meaning.
Where a lot has been going on—forest fires in the U.S., flooding in the U.S., wars and rumors of wars in the Middle East, and changes related to global climate change—it is hard for me to know . . . → Read More: Sticking to Our Guns
By Joel Bowman, on January 31st, 2011% Perception is a strange thing. We can’t always see what is “right before our eyes,” and because perception is fraught with deletion, distortion, and unwarranted generalization, what we “see” may not be what is actually “there.” Self-perception may be among the most distorted of our perceptions. The classic question, “Does this dress make me look fat,” is a variation of the question asked by the Queen in Snow White: “Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who in the land is fairest of all?” The Queen doesn’t like it when the mirror proclaims Snow White the fairest in the land. The . . . → Read More: Does This Mirror Make Me Look Fat?
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