The never-ending battle over gun control always seems to hit a brick wall at the Second Amendment, which states: “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.”
The statement raises important questions on all sides, regarding what, exactly, our Founding Fathers meant by it. By “Arms” did they necessarily mean “guns,” or would swords, knives, and spears suffice as arms? If they were talking specifically about guns, did they give any thought to what type of gun might be a bridge too far, given the horrors future technology might bring?
And, of course, why did they omit the compound-modifier hyphen that belongs between “well” and “regulated”? Was that their subtle hint that there’s an exception to every rule? Some of those Founding Fathers were mischievous scamps, after all.
Proper grammar aside, there are many on the left who would argue that our Founding Fathers could never have imagined AR-15s, and if they had, they never would have allowed private citizens to own them. Those on the right would argue exactly the opposite: that the Founding Fathers embraced the best weaponry they could obtain at the time, and that would have continued to do so in the foreseeable — or unforeseeable — future.
It’s the kind of dead-end debate that leads nowhere.
But now, a district judge may have opened a window that casts a new light on the debate — and maybe a doorway to a better future.
In overturning California’s assault weapons ban, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez said: “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”
I have a Swiss Army Knife — it’s sitting next to me right now as I write this — and I can see that the judge is right. I can imagine how quickly an AR-15 might open a wine bottle, remove a tree branch, disgorge a hook from a fish, cut through a sheet of paper, and a host of other vital tasks (though I’m having a hard time imagining swapping out the little toothpick for my assault rifle to get that bit of chicken out from between my upper molars. Although, in deference to my adamant right-wing friends who refuse to concede a single point in the debate, I must admit that it would get the job done.)
But it occurs to me that maybe we’ve all been missing the point here. And it took the Judge’s “Swiss Army Knife” analogy to open my eyes to the answer.
After all, our gun control debate has stalled over the issue of whether our Founding Fathers would have accepted or rejected futuristic guns of different sorts. But would they have written the Second Amendment differently if they could have imagined futuristic knives?
The Swiss Army Knife as we know it was invented in 1891 by Swiss cutler Karl Elsner, though there were similar prototypes a bit earlier. Charles Dickens even described a knife in his 1851 masterpiece “Moby Dick” with “not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers and countersinkers.” You gotta respect a writer who knows his way around a compound-modifier hyphen.
But Dickens wrote about that wondrous knife more than a half-century after our Founding Fathers like Madison, Adams, and Monroe struggled with the wording over what type of “arms” we should have the right to bear.
If the Swiss Army Knife had been invented a century earlier, how might the Second Amendment have been written differently?
Because now that a judge in California has assured us that a Swiss Army Knife is the “perfect combination of home defense…and homeland defense,” why would any sensible nation bother with making and owning AR-15’s or AK-47’s at all? Let’s all get a Swiss Army Knife and call it a day.
Then let’s eliminate assault guns altogether and make it mandatory for every citizen — even children — to own and carry a Swiss Army Knife. Mine even has a little leather belt holster, making it easy to grab in any home-or-homeland defense emergency.
I would gladly embrace not only my Second Amendment right to wear my Swiss Army Knife everywhere I go, but also proudly accept it as my duty to do so as a good American citizen and patriot. I would teach my grandchildren to do the same. I would encourage their teachers to come up with fun, useful Swiss Army Knife arts and crafts lessons — as well as homeland defense lessons — for the kids to learn.
Because when you strip a cowardly lunatic of his military-grade killing machine and arm him with nothing more than a Swiss-Army Knife, what chance would he stand against a classroom full of ten-year-olds armed exactly like him?
We’d be living in a better place today if we did that, wouldn’t we?
But I don’t blame our Founding Fathers for screwing up the Second Amendment. How could they have imagined the perfect combination of home-and-homeland defense tool known as the Swiss Army Knife?
They were born just a bit too soon.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
