Unchain Letter

Unchain Letter

 

          THIS LETTER was sent to protect you from luck, both good and bad. Receipt of this letter confers immunity to ALL FORMS of chain-letter bribery and extortion. You are now free to break any letter chain, without consequence. This works even if you are superstitious.

          You may hold onto this Unchain letter indefinitely, along with the next chain letter that finds its way to you. You may send copies of this letter to friends; and you may also refuse to send copies. It makes no difference.

          This Unchain letter admits freely that it is, in fact, a joke; yet it is no less credible than any Chain letter now in circulation. The following claims are completely baseless and absurd. Take them or leave them:

          An R.A.F. officer received this letter in the mail; many years later he also received a chain letter. It promised him riches if he duplicated it, and poverty if he broke the chain. Foolishly he made 20 copies and sent them to his friends. Four days later he got a phone call claiming that he had just inherited $23,000,000. However, this proved to be a wrong number, and the caller hung up.

          Naresh Singh of Bombay got a chain letter threatening him and his loved ones with death if he broke the chain. But this Unchain letter had gotten to him first; so he wisely decided to use the chain letter as a substitute for scarce toilet paper. That afternoon, while he and his family were visiting the marketplace, a crazed fanatic brandished an AK-47 and attempted to mow down the crowd; but the lunatic had neglected to load his weapon, so he was quickly taken into custody.

          Pablo Fuentes of Lima was under this Unchain letter’s protection when he got a chain letter promising him luck in the lottery. He sent out copies, and won nothing. Wen Xiao of Taipei received this letter, along with a chain letter; he took no action, and soon got a new job at equal pay.

          In 1984, a badly faded chain letter reached a young woman in Ontario. She promised that she would re-type the letter and send it on; but she delayed doing so. She was plagued by expensive car repairs until she received this Unchain letter. That very day she bought a new car, and her repair bills ceased.

          YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS LETTER BY RANDOM CHANCE, NOT FATE.

          REMEMBER: YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY FREE TO IGNORE ALL CHAIN LETTERS FROM NOW ON.

 

          Signed,

 

Miss Liberty

 

 

Second Amendment Repair Act

Second Amendment Repair Act

 

I propose the following as Federal legislation.

The Second Amendment Repair Act

1. The right of the people to keep and bear arms in a well-regulated State militia shall not be infringed.

2. Well-regulated militias shall not arm those under adult age, nor arm those found guilty of treason as defined by the Constitution.

3. States have the right to enforce other militia regulations.

 

Commentary by the author:

Compare clause 1 of SARA to the original 2nd 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.”

Alas, poor Amendment! The sentence lies there, broken into four fragments, as if someone had dropped it on the floor. My critique of the 2nd Amendment is both literary and political; for its shattered incoherence is due to an unresolved political dispute. Washington insisted on good regulation of Jefferson’s popular militias; his objection was jammed on as a subordinate clause given top billing.

Clause 1 of SARA fixes the grammar of the 2nd Amendment. It’s a single coherent clause; that prevents partisans from exaggerating one clause and ignoring another. The original had well-regulation as an explanation for the need for the right to bear arms; here well-regulation is part of the right itself. This makes explicit the necessary link between rights (arms) and responsibilities (well-regulated). Clause 1 is as much about gun control as about gun rights.

This re-emphasis on regulation empowers clause 2. No children in arms, nor traitors; that’s necessary. If the militia is well-regulated, then it may not arm children or adolescents, who are not well-regulated people; and if the militia is of the state, then it may not arm those levying war upon the states. I choose these two regulations for the sake of clarity. Age is on public record; and treason is defined in the Constitution. (Article 3, section 3.)

          Clause 3 establishes that the states may regulate militias as they see fit, as a matter of state’s rights.

          This proposal is very conservative, in the non-Orwellian sense of the word ‘conservative’. It makes few changes in the original text, beyond rewriting it for clarity. This rewriting explicitly mandates both gun rights and gun control. Such rewriting is necessary because of the 2nd Amendment’s fragmented condition.

          Since DC vs Heller in 2008, we have been living with a partial reading of the shattered 2nd Amendment, one that ignores the first two fragments and fetishizes the next two. So due to Scalia’s judicial activism, for over a decade the 2nd Amendment has been half-repealed, to malign effect now self-evident.

I propose that we repair it, and reinstate it, whole.

 

To The Next Mass Shooter

          To The Next Mass Shooter

          A Modest Proposal

 

          Dear Sir:

          I get where you’re coming from. They don’t, but I do. Life sucks, doesn’t it? You’ve got no friends, and you get no respect. Girls won’t date you, the asshole boss pays an insultingly low slave-wage, so your revenge arsenal cost you all of your money. You’re trapped, you’re dying inside, you hate everything and everybody, especially yourself, so you want to go out with a bang. I get it.

          I write to offer a suggestion. You see, all of your predecessors did their massacres all wrong, and we’ve grown bored with them. We’re jaded. Somebody shoots up a movie theater? Ho-hum. A school? Yawn. A church? Whatever!  Then we do nothing, and a day later we forget all about it. So what’s the point? Nobody’s impressed anymore!

          The problem is the choice of target. Killing masses of unarmed civilians is for wusses. It’s unsporting; and what’s worse, it’s no fun. Sure, it’s practical to slaughter the defenseless, but what do you care about practicality? You’re mad as hell, and they’ll never take you alive! You want action, not survival; you want to prove something. So leave the women and children alone, and target heavily-armed men!

          Now, where can you find a big crowd of well-armed men? A crowd that you can walk right up to, while just as well-armed, and they’ll do nothing before you open fire? Not the police station, nor the Army barracks; those guys are paranoid about other guys carrying. Really the police and the armed forces are gun-control organizations. They’re all about control: of the guns, by the guns, and for the guns.

          If you want a rabble of well-armed posers mentally unprepared for battle, then the best target for you, Sir, is the gun show.

          Never mind the odds. If you kill two of them right away, then no matter what happens next, the score will be at least 2 to 1, so you win. And your spree might last longer than you’d expect. Plenty of your predecessors were never stopped by gun-carriers; sometimes because those carriers couldn’t make a safe shot, sometimes because they didn’t want to look like mass shooters themselves. Really it’s because they’re posers. They want to seem as dangerous as you really are.

If you don’t mind dying, then the gun show is a soft target. You’ll shoot down plenty of them before they shoot back, and then they might miss you and hit each other. You might even spark a random fire-fight! You wouldn’t survive it, but so what? Think of the headlines!

          You won’t see them, of course, but we will, and finally we will be shocked. Shocked, I tell you! Finally a convincing rampage! Shooters shooting shooters: proof of the practical necessity of well-regulating the militia! Proof that even posers will believe!

          We might even name the resulting law after you.

Think about it.

          Sir.