Infringed



I love Colorado. I was not born there but I love her. The high mountains are the home my heart found. Of all the places I have been, they are to my eyes the loveliest. I saw clouds fill a valley below me until they looked liked heaped up mashed potatoes in a bowl. The weather was clear, up where I was. There are not many places on earth where you can watch weather happen from above.

Mountain marmots chirp like bad automobile brakes. Mountain lions steal puppies from  back yards. Bears mainly want to be left alone. Squirrels are curious, always looking around the branch or trunk to see the funny man with the rifle. The very plentiful squirrels give rise to a mountain aphorism: If you want to see squirrels, just go out in the woods and act like a nut.

Marmot
The people who live out in the country are generally conservative. They are few enough that they do not actually need many gun laws. Nearly everyone up there has a gun, knows not to point it in the wrong direction and that is all the matter amounts to. That's the supposed evil "gun culture." So Colorado's new and infringing laws make no sense for the high country. They do not make very much sense even for the more liberal population concentrations such as Denver and Boulder. Indeed, the new laws are imported from out of state. This legislative campaign was in large measure instigated and funded by New York's Mayor Bloomberg. There is very little in the laws that reflect the will of Colorado's people or their actual needs. This was a political demonstration pure and simple, that gun laws can be shoved through even in a pro-gun state. All you need is enough Democrats in the legislature and a little good old party line persuasion, plus a rich out of state agitator who is gung ho for anything politically left-leaning (the Latin word is sinister.)

The ostensible reason for the laws, or their proximate cause, was a shooting done by a mental case. However, the laws that were produced do not infringe the rights of the insane, but the sane. There is nothing in them that deals with the matter of our broken mental health system; instead, everyone is treated as a potential threat, which is exactly wrong. Of course the philosophy that says the guns of ordinary, sane and peaceful people are somehow a problem is directly opposite the thinking in back of the Second Amendment.

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