In his 1775 “Common Sense” pamphlet, Thomas Paine observed, “Society in every state is a blessing, but government in its best state is but a necessary evil.” While society propels collaboration toward goal achievement, government is the unfortunate but necessary contrivance tempering cultural annihilation.

The Consitution, the bedrock of government, is the Founders’ finest effort at integrating the elemental principles of equity, rationality, consistency, and predictability into a time-resistant document restraining our basest passions. On reflection, they created a satisfactory but imperfect charter. Then, as most people now desire security, bending the knee and submitting to government was essential to establishing a respectable new nation.

However, despite their best intentions and intellectual firepower concentrated on creating a safeguard against future tyranny, the Founders blew it, in layman’s parlance, with the phrasing of the Second Amendment. In deference, though, they could not have conceived that, 250 years on, Ramboesque, military-free synthetic patriots would pervert the Second Amendment.

Serene ignorance of the Colonial tensions, anxieties and ambiguities that birthed the Second Amendment is but a trifle to those who under no circumstance should possess a firearm but yet who assert their right to do just that. The Second Amendment paradox is that the happy convergence of some of the most brilliant minds ever to walk the earth wrote into the Bill of Rights, a document intended to keep citizens safe, a single sentence yielding the now regrettable circumstance of near-daily gun violence and tragedy.

Talk about negative unintended consequences. Common sense?

Jack Tulloss

Belchertown