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If the gun laws that Massachusetts has now had been in force in 1776, we'd all be Canadians.
An hour’s perusal of our national charter makes it hard to understand what all the argle-bargle is about. The First Amendment forbids any law “abridging the freedom of speech.” It doesn’t say, “except for commercials on children’s television” or “unless somebody says ‘f***’ in a rap song or ‘chick’ on a college campus.” The Second Amendment states that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” period. There is no mention of magazine size, rate of fire, or to what extent these arms may resemble assault rifles. All rifles were assault rifles in those days. Furthermore, if the gun laws that Massachusetts has now had been in force in 1776, we’d all be Canadians. And you know what kind of weather Canada has. There is no reference to abortion whatsoever in the Constitution, not even so much as an “I’ll pull out in time, Honey, honest.” The Tenth Amendment tells us “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means the power to stop the endless, vitriolic “Pro-Life” versus “Pro-Choice” argument is – just as the Amendment says – “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The Constitution is not hard to understand. Although the quality of reasoning degenerates in the later amendments. The Sixteenth Amendment is particularly awful:
The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived... And Section 4 of the Fourteenth is very silly: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law... shall not be questioned. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, giving the vote to 18-year-olds, must have been drafted by people who’d never met any 18-year-olds Constitution is easily glossed. The single exception being the Twelfth Amendment: ...The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such a majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, one of them... The idea seems to be to make the election of a president so complicated and annoying that no one with an important job or a serious avocation or who is presently making any substantial contribution to society or, worse, by people who were 18. But, on the whole, the text of the
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