You want me to take those cigarettes out of your mouths?

My recipe, after 30 years of smoking 1-3 packs a day, is this: have a mild myocardial infarction. When I left the hospital, the smell of the tobacco smoke at the door -- they can't smoke inside, natch -- almost made me projectile vomit.

Oddly, though I'd wrestled with quitting many times -- three times quitting for more than six months, and once for five years -- this time, I did literally nothing. No desire to smoke. The revulsion lasted only for a few months, but I never had the intense cravings every 15 minutes or so that had marked my other quitting ordeals. Now I read that it may have been a change made to my insula, a part of the brain. Stroke patients sometimes exhibit this. Maybe my heart attack did the same.

So, now it's six years, no smoking, and no feelings of deprivation. But I still have heart disease! Maybe if I smoked... no, it would just be worse, wouldn't it?

It's pretty simple, really. If you want to own the kind of weapons that a soldier would use in combat, you can. But buying one would mean you're volunteering to answer a phone call in the middle of the night to report to Iraq. That's the "well-armed militia" part. Own an automatic weapon, you just volunteered for Iraq. Uncle Sam thanks you for your purchase, private. The military could publish a list of "endorsed and combat-tested" weapons that volunteers could purchase to signal that they are eligible for unpaid militia work. Of course, they'd have to go to the local armory to practice, and wake up at 4:00 in the morning, and go on 50-mile hikes, too. If you join the Guard, then they give you the rifle for free!

I'd detach the question of hunting weapons and personal protection from that completely. About that, well, we all have the right to self-defense, so if somebody wants to own a weapon to hypothetically defend themselves, that's fine. If Boston wants to ban handguns, they can. If Texas wants to arm kindergartners, they can. But each state would be required just to keep statistics: how many cat burglars or midnight rapists shot between the eyes? How many accidents? How about suicides? Don't keep stats, you lose jurisdiction to the next highest body that will. Firearms have to be a normal issue like anything else, not a frickin' constitutional crisis.

The best course would be for safe communities would emerge from all the jurisdictions. Keep honest statistics. How many murders and robberies prevented, versus how many confused teenaged boys who blow out their brains? We'd see how well each rationale works. No "rights," no bad statistical work or studies lost in the rain, no Mary Rosh, no gun nuts. In other words, a problem in harm reduction. The same way we should treat marijuana or prostitution or any other thing that has good and bad aspects.

I'd suggest the same kind of regulatory powers for hunting. Of course you can hunt. Of course the state can regulate it for wisest practice. Have at it.

Instead, we have this pseudo-theological shouting match, unmatched in any country I know of. To gun or not to gun? Is it in the constitution or not? May a godly man blow a hole in his own head, and yet be wise? Yea, though I walk through the Valleys of Columbine, I shall keep my carbine. Bull. It seems we're headed to the New Bush Supremes going the other way: making the ownership of weapons into an individual right, not a right of us all to a "well-regulated militia." Creepy. We'll rue the day, and I will bet that the Second will eventually be amended to read more clearly: take out the the vague, 18th century language that points to a compromise that they tried to paper over because, well, it's not that important, is it? More important than who's a human being? More important than who can vote?

We won't, though. We'll end up shouting about whether that laser cannon can be used to hunt deer, or whether the Emulsifier Ray can be used constitutionally in home defense, or whether 50 million Doom Rays made by Hasbro Armaments should be bought for the Army.

Okay, well-regulated. Big deal, a mistype. In fact, it makes my point more clearly.

You obviously can't read anything outside your particular theology of the bullet.

It seems pretty clear to me that, in the days when people didn't want a standing army, they relied on a citizen's militia. The two phrases in the Second don't really make sense because they didn't. It was a political compromise.

If your right comes from a clause that has anything to do with a militia, then ownership of a gun which is usable in military terms means you're a volunteer, buddy. Have fun in Sadr City. Or wherever your town council wants you sent.

Nobody in the Constitutional Convention was looking to ban guns at all. They were, however, trying to figure out what to do about a standing army, now that the Revolution was over. They basically said that gun ownership shouldn't be banned because we need it for a militia. No establishment clause for a standing army.

However, the war of 1812, and the total lack of preparedness, the abject defeats we suffered, led to the citizen's militia falling out of favor.

So the Second Amendment fell out of use, or favor. And seeing as how it was a citizen's militia that raided Harper's Ferry, and fired on Sumter, they had a point.

I don't think we'll ever get to amend the Second Amendment, because men threatening you with guns get very touchy about Jesus and their revolvers, and love to end discussions forcefully.