For the edification of the reader I will now place in evidence the exact wording of the second amendment, proposed by the Congress on September 25, 1789, and thereafter ratified by a bunch of states over a series of years until ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution was completed on December 15, 1791, with the last few holdout states finally ratifying on April 13, 1939, when Connecticut FINALLY put its John Hancock to the paper. By the way Connecticut is where Lyme disease was first identified in a family that had been suffering from some very unpleasant rashes, swellings, fevers, joint pain and other symptoms. So named for Lyme, Connecticut, where this family lived. Which is not far from where I grew up, presumably with some of the same tick-carrying deer.

When you pull a tick off your dog and it’s been on there a few days or a week, it’ll be all bloated so you can’t even see its head or its little waving legs. It just looks like a big taut gray ball. So what you want to do is pull it off and then shoo your dog away. Then you want to drop the tick on a stone patio. I’m sure this is why so much flagstone is used in Connecticut. Nice and flat. Then you want to go “Eeeyoouu-ooo, gross” a few times. Then you take a hammer and smash it as hard as you can so all the blood goes flying all over the place. An alternate scheme involves igniting the gray ball with one of those big wooden matches. You achieve similar explosive mass, but in my book the added pyrotechnics do not compare with the sound of the hammer on the flagstone. I would give it a seven on the kid satisfaction gross out chart. The hammer gets a nine point eight.

So here it is, Article [II]:

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

That’s pretty simple. And from this we get twelve-year-olds blasting their way through middle school math class with dozens of rounds of ammo and kids who can’t drive yet bringing pipe bombs to school or ambushing their ten-year-old classmates from some bushes behind the soccer field.

I would just like to know how that equates with a “well regulated militia.” Anyone?