Another thought about the Second Amendment.

First of all, there is an enormous amount of paranoia in this country about both guns and the Second Amendment. Paranoia is good for the people who want no restrictions of gun manufacture or sales because it keeps people in fear that they will lose their rights and their guns. That's why big money is in back of paranoia production.

In fact, no one in power is talking about eliminating the Second Amendment and no one is talking about taking everyone's guns away from them. So why don't we drop the paranoia and talk about what really matters, which is why the gun lobby has such a tight grip on Congress that it is impossible to do anything about regulating gun traffic. 

The Second Amendment talks about citizens bearing arms so that a militia is always potentially available to come to the country's defense. It didn't talk about people carrying guns into theaters and shooting obnoxious men who text their daughters during previews (which happened just yesterday) or arming heads of households so they could accidentally shoot their sons coming in late through the back door (which happened years ago). The arms of the time were muskets and pistols, not weapons of nearly-massive destruction. 

My point is that the Constitution is a living document, meaning that it has to be reinterpreted and advanced as the times change. With a well trained and supplied military and National Guard, we may no longer need every person to be prepared with military-style weaponry. Just because the Second Amendment gave us the right to have a musket or two, I don't think it is rational to believe that everyone today has an equivalent "right" to posses an assault weapon. 

I have a 12-gauge shotgun for hunting but the law says that I must keep a plug in the magazine so that I can load only three shells. I have a six-shot Ruger pistol but the law says (in California at least) that I cannot carry it concealed in any way and that I am responsible for keeping it out of accessibility to children. There are other interesting laws. One cannot fly an airplane without first taking training and qualifying for a pilot's license. One cannot drive an automobile on public roadways without a training, a driver's license, and sufficient insurance. All of these laws are in the name of public safety. But virtually anyone can buy an assault weapon capable of killing hundreds of people within minutes without training, insurance, or any other regulation.

Yes, guns don't kill people. People kill people with guns (and with other things). But it is terribly difficult to predict what people are going to kill. It is way too simplistic to say that law abiding citizens can do anything they please and criminals are the ones to be regulated. Unfortunately, we don't know who the criminals are until they have committed a crime. (The man who shot the texter, mentioned above, was a retired policeman.)

When I wanted to go hunting, I had to take a training class before I could get a license to hunt. I don't see anything wrong with that, and in particular I never saw it as a violation of my Second Amendment rights. 

Global Warming and the Big Freeze

Well, the eastern US (that is, just about everything east of the Rocky Mountains) has had an extremely cold and icy winter thus far. So, of course, those who disbelieve in Global Warming and Climate Change are out in mass yelling "victory." 

But not so fast! Global Warming does not mean that we cannot have winters --- even severe winters. Indeed, the seasons continue to cycle through just as the tilted axis of earth intended. Global Warming is an issue of averages and requires us to look at long periods. So neither spectacular heat waves nor spectacular freezes have very much to say about it. The real question is whether actual temperature records around the earth demonstrate a gradual increase and, if so, whether we can observe consequences of this gradual rise in temperatures. So far as I know, scientists around the world are indeed recording increases in average temperatures and, among other observations, they are seeing the disappearance of polar ice, including the withdrawal of glaciers. All of this is problematic, when viewed through well established theories of weather generation because the polar ice has a great influence over the ways that weather events are generated in the latitudes below. American winters, for instance, are greatly influenced by the position of the so-called jet stream. The average position of the jet stream as it comes off the Pacific Ocean can bring snow into the Sierra Nevada and rain into Southern California or it can hang us out to dry. And the track of the jet stream is heavily influenced by what happens in the far north. If you have been following weather maps for the last few weeks, you will have noticed that the jet stream has been coming off the Pacific up in Oregon and then diving dramatically to the south east of Nevada, bringing extreme cold and snow to everywhere east of that line.

This much can be measured and observed. What causes Global Warming is a matter for speculation, though scientists are now reasonably confident that the output of "green house gases" is the culprit. Here is where politics --- left and right --- comes to the fore. If scientists are right in believing that green house gases should be blamed for Global Warming, then we should probably do something about the production of these gases to avoid the disastrous results predicted --- rising ocean levels that may well flood coastal regions and even bury small islands, and dramatic changes in world-wide weather patterns (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc). The problem is that reducing our output of green house gases requires changes in our habitual lifestyles, and there are powerful people who have huge investments in maintaining our habitual lifestyles. So the more rational among these people want to assert that the science is incomplete and inconclusive, and they are partly right. Scientists base their expectations on theoretical models that can always be challenged and should be challenged. That is what science is about. But this fact alone does not mean that scientists are presently wrong in what they believe; it simply means that we have to continue working on this. 

Now the more-nearly irrational disbelievers want to claim that scientists have formed a large Climate-Change Cult that is trying to use government (especially the socialist Federal government) to ruin the American paradise --- especially their own wealth-producing paradise of "big oil." This claim, of course, just demonstrates pure ignorance of what science is all about and how it works. If there is a cult at work here, it is the cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that has plagued the American scene for centuries.