Oh Lord Won't You Buy Me an Atomic Bomb???

So someone posted the photo on your left on Facebook. Now it is making its way across Facebook like one of those ponzi scheme letters of yore. Instead of asking those you sent it to to send it to others and to send you a dollar for each other they send it, this photo asks you to--this is what the brave world new world of narcissism and the world of cyberspace has come to--to like it. But let's get real. The Bill of Rights, read literally, interpreted according to the "holy" canons of original intent, guarantees, at best, that members of militias have access to eighteenth century muskets.

This photo and the click like key is in my mind the FB equivalent of those adolescents who when asked why they liked something couldn't give a reason for liking something beyond "because". Most of those who clicked I like the idea of keeping this gun legal did so for, as far as I could tell, purely emotional reasons. They offered no intellectual justification for keeping the pictured weapon of mass destruction legal and accessible to consumers. Taking such an emotional approach, stretching the intent of the authors of the Bill of Rights to include modern weapons of mass destruction and taking the second amendment argument to its logical endpoint, why should I be hindered from buying a machine gun? Why should I be hindered from having a flame thrower and using it anywhere I want? Why should I have to get a permit to use a bazooka? Why can't I have an atomic bomb? After all it isn't a machine gun, a flame thrower, a bazooka, or an atomic bomb that kills. It is the humans who choose to use them. Right?

One of the points I am making here, of course, is that we in the United States have long had reasonable and rational limits on weapons. And we should.