In the 1993 remake of the classic movie Born Yesterday, the ditzy Melanie Griffith character teaches the Bill of Rights to a table of dignitaries using a silly song.  The First Amendment is boiled down to ““say any crazy thing you like.”  That’s pretty accurate.

She barely touches on the Second Amendment.  It’s hard to be light-hearted about guns. What the 2nd actually says about weapons is intended to protect the colonists from the tyrannical king they had emigrated to escape.  A “well-ordered militia” meant civilians could arm themselves and shoot at the Red Coats.

Today, it means I could own guns if I wanted to. I don’t.  But I could. My former neighbor did, and, if wandered out into my front yard in the middle of the night to admire the moon, he could easily have mistaken me for a Red Coat and blown me to bits with his 10-gauge shotgun. That wouldn’t make him a murderer. Just someone who had aged-out of being a responsible gun owner.  Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Last week a murderer, a sniper, murdered a man who exercised free speech.  I am deeply offended by both these men.  Everyone hates a sniper.  And the murdered man is now a martyr.  Honestly, I had never heard of him until he was killed.  Since then I have researched some of the things he said.  As a woman, I am both saddened and horrified both by what he said and that he died because of it.

For a bunch of old, rich, white men, the founding fathers were brilliant in writing the Constitution and providing for amendments that serve us well to this day.  How we morally and ethically interpret them today is complex.

I can say any crazy thing I like, but I am very careful in what company I share my craziness. People who dare to say any thing negative about  this “martyr” are being threatened .

And not everybody should have lethal weapons. Recently, in two different states, grade-schoolers toted guns to school in their backpacks. Just put me in a room with their parents or with that sniper. I have a few things I would like to say to them.