My father's guns

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My father, Harald Maurer, died on Thursday, March 9, 1995. I was in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, when I got the news the next day. A few days later, I was in Zion, Illinois, visiting the funeral directors chosen by my mother from the Yellow Pages, and learned that she had directed them to bury my father without ceremony in a cemetery about ten miles away. There was a Veterans Administration-associated cemetery only five miles away, but my mother did not want his grave to be that close.

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(More about my father in last week's post.)

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I had no chance to influence these arrangements, or I might have been able to correct the information on his death certificate and the marker on his grave. His name was Harald, not Harold. The "Korea" on his marker might refer to the "police action" that was going on at the time of his service, but he was in U.S. military intelligence in Germany during his service, not in Korea. He was born in Ullensvang, Norway, not in Bergen. Well, at least the dates are correct.

When I collected my father's effects from the Decedent Affairs Office at the VA hospital where he lived his last year, and then died, and the few remaining items of his at my mother's apartment, I realized that these things would be my sole inheritance from him. He loved electronic gadgets, apparently; I brought home a collection of calculators, a pocket-sized shortwave radio, a digital dictionary, a shirt-pocket cassette recorder, and even a pocket-sized television. After my mother died, I also inherited her father's collection of Japanese art, but I have no idea what happened to the Japanese swords that enchanted me when I was a child. Were they sold for liquor? I never found out what happened to the family trust from which I had been disinherited when I left home.

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There is one more item of my father's that I haven't mentioned—the jewel of my father's miniature treasures, his .25 caliber Beretta. I had never seen this handgun before, and actually I had never seen any handgun that was such a beautiful piece of machinery.

I was actually fascinated and a bit disturbed by my own admiration for this thing that was intended to fire lethal projectiles. The first thing I did was to walk over to the Zion police department and ask whether there was any program for collecting loose handguns from the public. The officer at the desk laughed and said no, and suggested that if I didn't want the gun, I should sell it. Just like that.

The gun came with a box of ammunition, and Judy decreed, reasonably, that if I kept the Beretta, I had to store it far away from the ammunition. I hid the gun at home, and the ammunition in a closet at my office. I told a colleague at work about the gun, and he offered me $175 for it. Without doing any research, I accepted the proposed amount and said goodbye to this beautiful and troubling souvenir of my father.

There is one ritual I now wish I had done before selling the gun, but at the time I didn't really want to display it to my children. We had never had to deal with the issue of toy weapons in our home, and I didn't want to give an occasion for gun culture to enter in. But the regret is real, and it links to some of my favorite memories of my father.

In my growing-up years, my father owned two semi-automatic pistols. One was an old Luger that he had brought home from Germany after his military service there. I don't remember the other one, even though I've spent too much of today looking at pictures of handguns, and videos of handgun maintenance, hoping I'd recognize it. In any case, my memories concern his annual practice of disassembling,  cleaning, and lubricating the guns.

Ellen and I were welcome to sit and watch him do this. The scene looked somewhat like this picture, although the picture here shows us assembling a science kit. Step by step, he removed the magazines, disengaged the various catches and removed the actions, carefully cleaned the barrels and the individual parts with soft cloth and solvents and lubricants that smelled divine to me—these remain the scents that I most strongly associate with my father. I remember how carefully he laid out the parts of the guns on a special tablecloth only used for this purpose, and I can still recall the sharp snapping sounds when the pieces fit together again correctly. 

While doing this annual ritual, he spoke to us about never pointing a gun at anyone, even as a joke, even an unloaded gun, even a toy gun. The only other category of object he and my mother ever talked about with such reverence was books. Interestingly, our house was totally filled with books, but I never discovered where my father stored his guns.

My father never told us why he was so adamant about gun safety, but there's something I remember about both of my grandfathers. Both of them were in direct contact with war; both refused to romanticize it. My father's father was a lieutenant in the Norwegian resistance, but there he sometimes found himself talking young Norwegian hotheads out of anti-Nazi terrorism because of the awful consequences for innocent civilians. My mother's family was on the receiving end of U.S. bombs, in Kobe and Osaka, Japan.

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One of the most distressing aspects of our polarized, lie-filled political culture is the charge that people like me want to take guns away from the gun zealots. I asked my own dear Trump-supporting relative whether she realized that her political heroes told lies about me: "If the Dems win, they'll take away your guns." I have absolutely no desire to infringe the right to keep and bear arms; I've even advocated giving guns to citizens! I just want to reduce to an absolute minimum any chance that they will be pointed at human beings. My gun-owning father's warnings still echo in my mind.

If free speech hits its limit if someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater, then gun freedom has a limit as well: it should prevent someone going into a church or school or hospital or grocery store with a lethal weapon and a deadly chip on their shoulder. And when that does happen again, as it will, I want to see a chain of registrations from manufacturer, to seller, to buyer, that gives law enforcement a chance to find out where the safeguards broke down. I want to infringe the rights of gun worshippers to normalize gun exhibitionism as a political signal.

Extremists usually have an advantage in any political struggle—they are ready to devote maximum effort to their passion, with minimum regard for fairness, while moderates just want to get along. It's time for those who cherish fairness to show some passion, too. Here's what is happening to me: I'm tired of being lied about.

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How do Friends relate to military veterans, and to the varied effects of war? (Personal note: World War II killed 52 million people ... and formed my family across enemy lines.) (Thanks to Jim Fussell/Facebook for the link.)

Alisa Ruddell and the missing Mother of God (fascinating review of Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood).

Claire Flourish looks at Britain Yearly Meeting 2022, and her own participation. It's a tender description that doesn't require any comment from me.

Derek Lamson updates his Web site ... and note the free download!

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Maggie Bell and Albert Collins, "Stormy Monday."

Realism 2.0

Madras (Oregon) sunset

The conventional wisdom:

You want sane gun control policies? A day in Washington DC without a new outrage? A genuine presidential election in Russia? Don't hold your breath!

As I noted after Russia's 2016 legislative elections, the advice to "be realistic" is too often simply a wet blanket to smother our hopes for something better. This evening on television, in response to the cries from Stoneman Douglas High School students and parents, pleading for action on gun control, I heard that same old cynicism: "Why," asked the worldly-wise, "should we expect a genuine response this time?"

We in fact won't do any better this time than we have before, if we surrender to this passivity. But the opposite of passivity isn't frantic perfection! I like these words from Jim Manney:

There’s an old saying that we should “pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.” It’s been attributed to Ignatius (though there’s no evidence that he said it), and many think it captures the Ignatian spirit: turning it all over to God in prayer and then working tirelessly and urgently to do God’s work. I prefer to reverse it: “pray as if everything depends on you, work as if everything depends on God.” This means that prayer has to be urgent: God has to do something dramatic if everything depends on me. It also puts our work in the right perspective: if it depends on God, we can let it go. We can work hard but leave the outcome up to him. If God is in charge we can tolerate mixed results and endure failure.

In any given moment, we may have no guarantee that our vision or our resistance will prevail, but we're working "as if everything depended on God." Listen, we are a happy people -- it has been given to us to work in collaboration with the Holy Spirit, accepting success and failure with an eager persistence and willingness to pray and learn and try again.

I have this odd intuition that, in fact, we're finally gaining on the bullies. They've overplayed their hand. A couple of years ago I saw a documentary on the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The vicious German machine-gun fire cut into the lines of invading troops coming ashore with awful effect, but those same machine gun bullets were strangely ineffective when traveling through more than a few feet of water. The water's resistance was enough to slow the bullets to a nonlethal speed.

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Similarly, I dare to hope, our own increasing resistance may be taking its toll on the bullies.  The #MeToo movement is shaking up ancient assumptions of impunity for sexually aggressive power figures. Domestic violence, even by highly-placed White House officials, is no longer a "private" matter. Corruption and arrogance in state and federal cabinets are provoking resistance, too. Strangely, Donald Trump's relentless barrage of abusive Twitter remarks may itself lead to an outpouring of "we've had enough!"

Another case of resistance: as the Russian authorities try to shut down the exposes of corruption and the election-boycott campaign of Alexei Navalny's team, they don't give in to traditional fatalism. Instead, persistence and humor keep the team's message accessible. (Example: want the snowbanks cleared from your street? Spraypaint Navalny's name on the snow, and chances are it will get shoveled!) Even Navalny's banned Web site remains at least sporadically accessible.

After yesterday's catastrophe in Florida: the millions spent on lobbying against gun control in the USA may not be enough, this time, to ward off the day of reckoning. True, the number of guns already on American streets still will be in the hundreds of millions for a long time to come, so there are no simple solutions. But this time our outrage may finally force recognition that changes are needed and demanded. The U.S. Constitution's first-amendment guarantee of free speech has limitations directly connected to public safety; the exact same consideration must be restored to the second amendment's right to keep and bear arms. Best of all would be to modify that amendment, but a close second might be to require all gun owners to become part of a "well regulated Militia." Whatever the ultimate solution, let's keep the pressure on the politicians to focus, for a change, on our children's right to stay alive, or be prepared to explain themselves to an angry electorate.

If I'm right that the bullies may soon be, at long last, in retreat, I don't want them to be replaced by progressive bullies. Rage, however righteous, can be dangerously intoxicating. The discipline of "working as if everything depends on God" recognizes that many of our efforts will be tentative and partial and experimental. At first we may simply be shaking off the habits of passivity, before we gain confidence in the ways forward. If we allow ourselves to be heroically critical of the principalities and powers, but cut off those who criticize us, we'll soon be creating new oppressions in place of the ones we fought.

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Over thirty years ago, I attended a conference on discernment at Quaker Hill Conference Center. I remember Jan Wood defining discernment, not as finding certainty or uniformity, but learning to turn our faces toward God. That's what realism has come to mean for me.

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David Byrne's repost: Guns are about freedom....

A spiritual analysis of gun violence from William De Arteaga.

Brian Beutler tours the confusing funhouse of rightwing conspiracy theories. (Reminder from last summer that the "left" is not immune.)

Election day in Russia is March 18. In Yekaterinburg, people are discussing just about anything else.

Friday PS: Another victory for citizens making noise: a Russian professor, fired for protesting low pay, is reinstated.

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Roger Ridley and Grandpa Elliott, together for the last time on a Playing for Change video...

March shorts

I'm so delighted to read that Francis Spufford's achingly good Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense is a finalist for the Michael Ramsey Book Prize for 2016. Here you can read a summary of this wonderful book by a member of the shortlisting panel, as he explains why the book is worth considering.

This bit at the end of Spufford's introduction helps explain his mission: presenting faith to a culture that not only marginalizes faith, but reinforces that marginalization with sneering condescension, or alternatively an attitude of total disinterest....

What else? Oh yes: the swearing. Why do I swear so much in what you are about to read? To make a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities are not made of glass, do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience. To express a serious and appropriate judgment on human destructiveness. But most of all, in order to help me nerve myself up for the foolishness, in my own setting, of what I am doing. To relieve my feelings as I inflict on myself an undignified self-ejection from the protections of irony. I am an Englishman writing about religion. Naturally I'm f------ embarrassed.

I wrote briefly here about Spufford's mostly-fictional masterpiece about the Soviet Union, Red Plenty.

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For years I was under the delusion that people who support gun control would eventually prevail based on sheer common sense coupled with the costly realism imposed by repeated massacres. Surely, somehow, gun-owners would rise up and give gun-worshippers a decisive talking-to. But as the corpses continue to pile up, I'm questioning this fantasy.

Two things helped me recover my sanity.

One was the eye-opening conflict over the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the San Bernardino iPhone that might have valuable information on terrorist links. It reminded me of other law-enforcement gambits to combat terrorism, such as going undercover to sell explosives to would-be jihadists, then entrapping them with the federally-provided evidence. Aside from the many other issues in such cases, I'm fascinated by assumptions that phones and explosives are fair game for law enforcement but guns are sacred. Bullets are usually driven by explosives, but this specific use of explosives is protected because it's in a gun. Never mind the large-scale constant havoc wreaked in a country flooded with guns; let's focus our efforts on everything but them. (Sarcasm alert.) Let the gun extremists who hate regulation control the definition of a "well regulated militia."

Anyway, I'm done arguing. I realize that this coddling of gun extremists is simply one of the flaws in a wonderful but flawed country. No country is perfect, after all; all countries have weaknesses and complexes, despite their wonderful qualities. Right now I love living in Russia, but to live here among these wonderful neighbors, colleagues, and students, I have to tolerate the near-absence of due process and the constant diversion of resources away from human needs (schools, roads, rural hospitals) into private pockets. Name a country that doesn't have equivalent flaws. The specifically American risks, I guess, include living among zillions of guns and a statistically significant bunch of people who can't control their trigger fingers. Evidence suggests we're a long way from fixing this.

By the way, Russians are their own best critics. They would be the first to stipulate that inadequate planning and attention to detail are often weaknesses here, and some might attribute these weaknesses to the national mentality of avos', a nearly untranslatable word that variously means "maybe," "hopefully," "on the off-chance." But our U.S. national attitude toward guns shows that, at least in this specific area, Russia isn't the only country whose citizens are willing to gamble their children's fate on avos'.

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On the bright side, the death penalty seems to be weakening in the USA, not least because conservatives have begun questioning it -- according to an article by Nick Cohen in the Guardian.

When I read Cohen's words, I remembered appearing before a committee hearing of the Indiana State Senate on February 17, 1999. Republican senator Morris Mills, a Quaker, was leading an effort to abolish capital punishment, and I testified on behalf of Friends United Meeting's stated position on the issue, and on my own personal testimony as the survivor of a murder victim.

Most of the testimony that day was from opponents of capital punishment, including at least one prosecutor who described the enormous costs of pursuing the death penalty through trial and multiple appeals. There was one very emotional pro-death penalty testimony in which the advocate, a policeman, described a murder case that seemed, by the depth of its cruelty, to beg for the retributive finality of execution.

But how was that murderer formed? In my own testimony, I said,

My father attended Tyrone King’s murder trial [King was ultimately convicted of murdering my sister Ellen], and mentioned meeting his mother, who attempted to give him a Gospel tract. I feel sure that God did not create the child Tyrone King to murder my sister. What happened to twist a little boy into an adult murderer? Don’t get me wrong: Tyrone King, and not his environment, bears responsibility for pulling the trigger. However, putting him to death would have been far too convenient a way for society to avoid the difficult questions about how innocent children can be overcome by evil as they grow up. It is too easy to kill the murderer and wash our hands of these dilemmas.

What I didn't say was something that only hit me when I listened to that police officer describe the awful murder that led to his support for the death penalty: We owe it to the suffering survivors of the victims of such cruelty to ask them honestly and directly and humbly for forbearance. We should say to them, "As much as we would like to impose just closure on this case, society cannot afford to kill your relative's torturer and murderer. We cannot guarantee that the violence we unleash in your righteous cause will always serve justice. Please understand that we do not value the victim's life any less just because we don't kill the killer -- we simply can't trust the death-penalty mechanism to do reliably what you would like it to do." In other words, say honestly that victims' families must forgo the satisfaction of execution because society cannot tolerate the abuse of that satisfaction when the mechanism goes wrong ... and it has already gone wrong too many times.

Abolition didn't prevail that day in the Indiana Senate, but abolition does seem closer now.

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There's something so evangelistically essential that unites the movements for abolishing capital punishment, confronting racism and elitism, recognizing men's and women's equality in church leadership, and stripping the romantic pretensions from violence and wealth. All those false "exceptions" to the good news -- violent pseudo-righteousness, false social distinctions, vanity of all kinds -- reveal our unwillingness to grant Jesus full leadership. Each "yes, but" weakens our case before the unbelieving world. Each compromise opens up another weak point for cynicism to penetrate.

I know that not everyone will simultaneously acknowledge all compromises, and I don't want to place perfectionist conditions on our fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we disagree. After all, we Quakers have our own blind spots. (Don't we??)  But I want to urge more dialogue on precisely this point: the credibility of the Gospel in a world that has heard so many Christian excuses for supporting, on this or that pretext, the claims of the principalities and powers rather than the claims of Christ.

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Sean Guillory on the life of a black agronomist in Soviet Russia and related historical legacies.

Why are Jehovah's Witnesses persecuted in Russia?

Russian authorities target social media users.

Another way of looking at the wrath of God.

Rightsizing

The Great Moscow Circus on Vernadsky Prospect.  Up until this past weekend, I'd never been to the circus in Russia, to the horror of some of our friends. On Saturday I corrected this deficiency. I still have some nagging questions about circuses in general, but it was very impressed by the art and spectacle here.

In the world of business, "rightsizing" is sometimes a euphemism for the unpleasant prospect of "downsizing" -- for reducing the workforce. But in the context of American politics, maybe "rightsizing" could be exactly the concept that could unite both conservatives and progressives as a goal for government reform.

When I was in university in Canada, zero-based budgeting was just coming into vogue as an important principle in Canadian public administration. But the "zero" doesn't mean reducing the government to zero in accordance with some ideological talking point, it means that every line item must justify itself rather than coast from year to year. It means that the resources allocated to the government must be sufficient to pay for the tasks assigned to the government by the people through the legislative process -- no less, no more.

In practice, even with the help of computers, starting each budget cycle at zero for each of the thousands (millions) of federal government budget lines is impractical, but every program and office can sooner or later take its turn to face something like the following grilling:

• Is this program doing what it should? How do we know? Does it need to continue?

• Is this program leaking money or resources? Is it trustworthy or does it resist examination?

• Can its functions be integrated with another program, another department, a public-private collaboration, without sacrificing accountability? How do we preserve the expertise it has built up while not just letting it coast?

No doubt many such questions are already asked, but how do citizens find the answers? Most U.S. taxpayers don't begrudge taxes well spent, but debates that polarize around "tax and spend liberals" and "drowning government in a bathtub" avoid tackling this central question: slogans aside, how exactly do we gain and keep the taxpayer's trust?

Let's remind ourselves why we have a government at all. In the words of the U.S. Constitution, the institutions it sets up are intended "... to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...." These are not inconsequential goals. Even if they can be met in part simply by maintaining a right division of labor with the constituent states and the people themselves, there is still plenty for the federal government to do on behalf of the whole country. But how do we keep trust and proportionality in the process?

Here are some of the ways I'd love to see this theme influence our debates on government:

Am I just a total idealist, or can we in fact use budgetary discipline to build bridges between conservatives and progressives? Where are our pilot projects? How can we creatively harness the skepticism each group has about the other, and the ways we can correct each other's blind spots, so that neither cynicism nor complacency wins the day?

Can we take a more inclusive and systemic approach to "the general Welfare"? For example, let's take health care financing and health insurance. Disease and trauma hit every single person at some point, so why should medical care not be classified as a social benefit just as fire and police departments, schools, and public libraries meet similarly near-universal human needs? Somehow, in the USA, we have defined fire departments and public libraries as suitable for public support, but the far more expensive institutions of health care have been defined as mostly reserved for private markets. Only public health  (screening, contagion, and some mental health and addiction concerns) and health insurance for retirees are recognized as requiring at least some fire-department-like attention. I really don't understand why we should trust the enormous bureaucracies of private insurance companies, given their financial incentives, to be more honest and caring than a well-run government. And if a government isn't well-run, if it doesn't serve us well, then that is the problem we need to sort out.

Critics of single-payer health care financing correctly say that taxes would have to increase to cover a centralized system, and defenders say that the savings from eliminating the huge private bureaucracies and cost-calculating systems now in place would more than cover the cost. But do these critics and advocates actually confer with each other rather than shouting at external audiences? If they do, please help me find the conversations, because this is a major issue in the current presidential campaign, and I hear almost nothing now but one-upsmanship.

What is the proper role of government in regulating our "militias" well, including guns held in private hands? In most of the world, for better or for worse, it is long-settled practice that the government has a monopoly on lethal violence. People are of course allowed to hunt, but not each other. Our Constitution protects gun ownership, but how we buy and sell guns, and of what type, and where we carry them, is of immediate and understandable interest to law enforcement -- those whom we expect to maintain that lethal monopoly. How do we have a thoughtful conversation about our expectations of government to regulate a better balance between gun-owners' rights and the protection of the general public?

There's a lot of dishonest rhetoric around these functions of government. For example, we already have a fair amount of gun control in place at various levels of government: rules about buying guns, carrying them on public transport, prohibiting many kinds of weapons altogether, and similar common-sense "infringements"; but because civility on this subject has broken down so thoroughly, we can't even begin systematic improvements to this patchwork approach. As a result, there is nothing "well regulated" about our government's function of keeping us safe from guns. Can we ever establish an arena to compare our different understandings?

I have the sense that many militant gun-rights advocates feel the government is not trustworthy in this area any more than it is in budgeting and taxation. But again, sort that out separately; your private gun collection, or your off-balance neighbor's, is more likely to cause local mayhem than a renaissance of good national government. And please be honest: no politician on the national scene today wants to take anyone's legally-acquired and safely-stored weapon away from them.

Finally, can our country's worldwide imperial pretensions be rightsized? As a Christian pacifist, I have some predictable prejudices in this area, but even setting that dimension aside for a moment, I want to know when and where we can ask (for example) questions about the $65 billion we've spent on Afghanistan's military forces and $25 billion on Iraq's, neither of which seem ready for prime time. These are not Golden Fleece-sized scandals -- these sorts of unaccountable expenditures dwarf most of the welfare programs that seem so dispensable to many politicians. As with health care financing reform, incremental approaches to our worldwide military expenditures probably won't work. We need to figure out how we fit into the world community generally and how to pay for the space we take up in that world system. In the meantime, it seems to me that there's still an important place for war tax resistance. One Christian family's taxes pays for only a few moments of this permanent war, but if a significant proportion of the evangelical community decided it had enough....

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Nicaea II ... will it happen?

All Christians are refugees.

Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly and the same old question: do journalists (and does anyone) understand who evangelicals are?

Today the ruble sank well below the 80-per-dollar mark. In the meantime, Russians face economic uncertainty with, among other things, a national treasure of a different kind: humor.

My previous gun control proposal -- free guns!

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Jean-Rene Ella performs a Skip James song ...

Guns and gun control: "The problem is the problem"

Cover of Unspecial Effects for Graphic
Designers

Bob Gill has influenced three generations of artists, designers, and their collaborating wordsmiths, me among them. Among his principles is one that he illustrates in his classic Forget all the rules about graphic design. Including the ones in this book --a principle I'd love to see translated into political culture, namely "the problem is the problem."

For designers, "the problem" is the idea or opinion driving the design--not the artist's need to be clever or to illustrate one's own mastery or sophistication. The time spent defining the actual problem, while filtering out vanity, old habits, assumptions, cultural noise, and other distractions, always pays off in the power and directness of the result.

Is it possible for political actors to follow this principle? Or are there too many incentives to obscure, inflate, or completely ignore the presenting problem in order to solve other "problems" (flattering voters, stoking resentment, enlarging the pork barrel for one's local district, seizing disputed territory, and on and on)?

Today's example:

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. (Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.)

Right now, there is a huge political and cultural conflict going on in the USA between those who emphasize "well regulated" and those who emphasize "shall not be infringed." More generally, the conflict is often between those who viscerally dislike guns and those who are passionate about their right to have the widest possible variety of guns and the easiest possible access to new ones. The conflict comes to a boil whenever even the most timid proposals for regulating gun purchases reach a legislature.

I'm under no illusions that such regulations would have kept my sister Ellen's intestines from being fatally shredded by her kidnapper's sawed-off shotgun. But I believe that the romance of armed violence, a menacing undercurrent in my beloved country's national psyche from the very beginning, helped lead to a situation where criminals find easy access to sawed-off shotguns and other indefensible death-tools. And it is also no coincidence that a country saturated with guns also has a murder rate without equal in the civilized world. Yes, "guns don't kill people--people kill people," and in gun-happy America, they do it very conveniently.

So here's my attempt to look at the problem with a define-the-problem approach--laying aside my own pacifism for the moment, recognizing that the U.S. Constitution was not shaped by a discipleship of nonviolence. Whether I personally like it or not, it seems to me that the Constitution poses the real problem as follows:

1. Being a "free state" and desiring security as the world understands security, we need a militia (or, in more modern terms, an armed reserve force or national guard).
2. The people make up the militia.
3. The militia must be armed.

Therefore, why not consider the following?:

1. We give a weapon to every citizen who is prepared to serve in the militia, along with the training to use that weapon, and a locker to store it safely.
2. Anyone who does not agree to serve in the militia is not issued a weapon, because to spread weapons around indiscriminately is the opposite of "well regulated."
3. Private citizens who want a weapon for private reasons can certainly buy them at their own expense, but must register their weapons with, and get training from, the militia.

Obviously, this leaves out a lot of details ...

1. Who, in practical terms, are "the people" for purposes of the Second Amendment? Would it be anyone entitled to vote, for example?
2. Does the militia's management choose who gets which kind of weapon, based on geographic or strategic considerations? Or does everyone get one standard infantry model? Do militiamen and women choose their own weapon based on private fascinations and tastes? Is there a price limit?
3. Where do conscientious objectors fit in? Can they get a weapon for sports or hunting?
4. What about people whose appetite for weapons exceeds the requirements of the militia?
5. If a militia is composed of the people, does this mean that it is managed locally rather than from the federal center? What are the implications for accountability to the "free state" as a whole?

... and a million more complications. But, if people on all sides of the issue are truly willing to define "the problem" in constitutional terms, those complications might be manageable. If they're not willing, the constitutional guarantee, as far as I can see, is being used dishonestly. One's love or dislike of weapons, one's suspicions of the President or of the National Rifle Association, the interests of gun shop owners, and so on, are distinguishable from the core problem defined by the Constitution.

Can gun-hating liberals countenance a situation where there might actually be more guns in more hands, and even purchased with their taxes? Are pro-gunners ready to subordinate their love of guns to the actual security needs of a "free state" and the commands of a well-regulated militia?

Am I properly applying Gill's principle?

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Today is Victory Day in Russia. On every previous Victory Day we've gathered with many others at Lenin Square in Elektrostal and marched to the war memorial to lay roses at the eternal flame there. But today we were invited by friends to enjoy a barbecue with them at a beautiful park and reservoir, and saw how many other Russians celebrate the near-equivalent of the USA's Memorial Day. It was a perfect day to spend with wonderful company.

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... and "Stalin as victory's unwanted guest." (Well, a little bit wanted in Yakutsk.)

More on the "foreign agents" front, including comments from Sergei Nikitin. Bird group's wings may be clipped.

"Addicted to Guns": a new and thoughtful article on gun violence in Chicago, the very city where my sister was gunned down 43 years ago.

Reflections and selections--Christian writers on the late Dallas Willard: Jeff Dunn; Brian McLaren; Rachel Held Evans (and see comments).

... Also: remembering Brennan Manning.

Thinking about depression and grief and how they might differ: Ann Marie Miller writes from experience.

"Rejoice in the Lord always"--even when you are found guilty. Some of us are quick to find flaws in Russian trials--any chance things weren't exactly perfect in Tennessee?

A professional translator writes on "Doing things for money versus doing things for fun."

Two interesting blogging-related items: David K. Flowers on "What My Perfect Post Would Say." The Very Worst Missionary on "What Would Jesus ... Blog?"

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Beverly Guitar Watkins (with thanks to Ron W for the lead).