Letter to the Editor
The people who founded this country were imaginative men: Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson said we needed no king at a time when most of the world was governed by kings. Benjamin Franklin said certain things were "self evident." Legitimacy sprang from "consent of the governed." Radical leaps of imagination could change the world. And they did.
But somehow in recent years, an attitude has taken hold on the Supreme Court calling itself "originalism," meaning that imagination was a gift of the Founders forbidden to ourselves. Out of respect to them, we are to restrain our own creativity, especially interpreting the Constitution, and most especially the Second Amendment.
The Founders themselves would have been shocked at such restraint. They not only questioned authority, they defied the most powerful empire in the world and wrote a Declaration of Independence against it. But did George Washington, James Madison or any of the others anticipate invention of a miniaturized all-plastic burp gun designed to get through metal detectors?
Since we've had school shootings every week on average after Columbine made it a fad among the demented, it's enough to make us wonder, "What if this week's school shooting doesn't happen at a school?"
What if somebody gets through security and manages to shoot up the Supreme Court itself? Would attitudes change? If they are content to ignore the effects of lax gun laws on people with mental problems or the immature, not to mention negligent parents who keep loaded rifles above the fireplace, one can almost hope the person with an all-plastic gun will awaken their imagination and stop them from sleeping on the bench.
Harry ComptonBartlesville*Compton is a Virginia Tech graduate who remembers the mass shooting on that campus in 2007.
This article originally appeared on Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: Letter to the Editor
