Pun Salad

■ Proverbs 20:18 goes all Sun Tzu on us:

¹⁸ Plans are established by seeking advice;
    so if you wage war, obtain guidance.

"… maybe you should read The Art of War, for example. The Kindle version is free at Amazon!"

■ Charles C. W. Cooke has An Open Rant Aimed at Those Who Would Repeal the Second Amendment. Or, more specifically, those who say they want to:

That being so, here’s the million-dollar question: What the hell are they waiting for? Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it.

Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution.

Mr. Cooke wrote that in 2015.

■ @kevinNR makes a related point: It’s Time to Do Nothing about Guns.

As the White Rabbit said: “Don’t just do something — stand there.”

In a podcast the day after the massacre in Las Vegas, Michael Graham asked me what supporters of the Second Amendment ought to do in reaction to such horrifying events. My answer at the time was: nothing. And nothing that has transpired since then has shown me cause to modify that position. It is in the nature of reactionaries to react, but very often the right course of action is inaction.

To my friend Michael, that’s cold-fish stuff. What’s needed, he argued, is passion: an emotional discharge in the service of a proactive agenda. While bookish types such as myself are mustering evidence and reason behind a dispassionate analysis of the facts, he argued, the gun-grabbers and other demagogues are getting the rubes all riled up (I am rephrasing) to do . . . something. “We have to do something!” he insisted.

Well, no. Kevin explains why not.

■ Also check out Jacob Sullum at Reason, who notes, correctly: A Massacre Is Not an Argument.

The morning after a gunman murdered nearly 60 people in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton tweeted that "we can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again." The former Democratic presidential nominee's commitment to putting politics aside was gone in an instant, and her implicit claim that she knows how to "stop this from happening again" was equally empty.

There's a grim amusement in noting that the Woman Who Came Too Close to the Presidency can't even keep from contradicting herself within the space of a short tweet.

■ As usual, Gregg Easterbrook's TMQ column this week has interesting non-football content, but I liked this too:

That the Star Spangled Banner Concerns War Between the United States and England Never Comes Up When the Song Is Sung at London NFL Games. Before the London game, three Miami players knelt during the National Anthem but stood for God Save the Queen. Britain was highly active in the slave trade in North America and the Caribbean, yet somehow now is due respect that African-American players deny to the United States. At least this stanza of God Save the Queen was not performed: “Scatter [the Queen’s] enemies and make them fall / Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks.”

Good luck making sense out of NFL players' pre-kickoff acrobatics.

■ And our Google LFOD alert was triggered by a Free Keene article: Shielded ZCash Transaction at NH Retail Store.

A customer purchased a “Live Free or Die” wood plaque and a “Legalize Gay Marijuana” bumper sticker at the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire using an encrypted digital currency called ZCash.

"Legalize Gay Marijuana". Heh.

Uncompensated link: the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe. They're hardcore.