Just the other day I was reading a transcript of a speech given by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson to the Virginia Bar Association in 1947, shortly after he returned from the Nuremberg International War Tribunals. A lot of very good food for thought in thre. Much of what he said is equally applicable today.

Particularly striking to me was this quote:

"You can trace in Goering’s admission after admission the steps they took to overthrow a free government and set up a totalitarian state. It would be well worth the American’s time to learn how it was done because the Weimar constitution had almost as good protection on paper for civil liberty as our Constitution has. Yet they managed to set up the concentration camps and the Gestapo and a dictatorship because the German people did not recognize the symptoms of a coming totalitarianism. All of that is documented."

Another quote continues to pop up in my mind:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

I was invited to speak to a class in Political Science (public policy and gun control) at Westmont College last week. The professor invited me in an email to bring a semi-automatic rifle on to campus - in direct contravention of the published policies of the campus. I did stand and deliver on the Second Amendment for several hours and why it was a good idea not to erase one of the rights in the Bill of Rights without benefit of the amendment process. I didn't bring a gun on campus, in spite of the invitation. It would have been helpful to the discussion and exciting for the students (Westmont is a particularly cloistered liberal arts college), but no way I'm going to be my rights on the say-so of some professor. Meanwhile the kids are invited out to the range in a few weeks to shoot. Heh.

I agree with the school on the boxes of ammo. It's far easier to forget to place a weapon on safe, or not carefully check the chamber when you're clearing it. So when it comes to firearms safety I'm in favor of coming down on people for attention to detail to prevent the real negligence from ever happening.

That said, I'm sure it was just a knee jerk response by a school administrator.

I have another name for the acronym "TSA" that is not fit for public sites such as this. I have however made it a practice to remove from my keys both the Charlton Heston Silver Bullet as well as a .40 casing key chain I got at the 2005 NRA Annual Meeting. While I have from time to time run into some TSA agents that can use common sense (one actually exists in Richmond, VA) it has been my experience that they are the exception rather than the rule. The so-called supervisors are the worst.

Two notes: Robert Jackson was one of our most erudite justices to ever sit on the Supreme Court. It is a little known secret that he did not attend law school. EVER.

Perhaps that is why he was so demonstrably in favor of liberty, the constitution, and eternal suspicion of government.

Note two: TSA is a dog and half-pony show. The dogs are the agents at airports,etc. the half-ponies (horses' asses) are their supervision.

Wow. I mind my high-school sweety having her Dad buy her a special left-side ejecting shotgun, she being left-handed. A good skeet shooter she was, though maybe 95lbs. soaking wet.