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Uriel is coming home today. He's coming home to join his unit and serve in what is expected to be a long and ugly war.

Sharleen is not happy about this, but gets it. I don't think it could be otherwise and my son come out whole. I shared this about that in the obituaries I wrote about my father:

It's easy now to say “I lived, maybe that was my purpose,” but I know it would have made me nuts to know my friends were out there on the front, and I was here, in a place I hated, far removed from the people most important to me. And I can wonder that I might be dead if I'd been there, but sometimes death doesn't seem that bad an alternative.…

You told me when I came to Israel the summer I was fifteen, “Don't be a hero.“ I think it's the one thing I would have liked to be, the gift I never gave myself, to know myself as courageous, to having fear and acting anyway. I might have actually made you proud of me; and I might be dead, but that's a small price to pay.

Uri is smart. Uri is careful. He sliced his finger open with a knife when he was two. I don't think he has needed stitches since.

But he also has a huge heart.

So we will worry. We can't help it. But we'll also know he is in the only place he could be.

And we will pray we prepared him well enough that he will survive this day, and tens of thousands more.

At least I polished his boots. I wish I were trained that I could play a more active part in the conflict that is upon us.

In the meantime, I will do with my words what I can not do with my hands,

I will also start carrying. When Jews look weak, the whole world pounces. It is the corollary to what my friend Roger experienced when the State of Israel was pronounced. He lived in New York at the time: the strength the Jewish people showed in their war of Independence made Jews occur as more formidable everywhere. The feeling was palpable. The harrassment of the Jew in the free world abated.

For some of us, it is clear that our failure to be strong, to exert our sovereignty over that which is rightfully ours, to stop our enemies when they are “only” throwing rocks, to counter their narrative and the UNRWA creation of inherited refugee and victim status, is the reason that 700 more are dead, and that my son is going into harm's way.

The governor's proposal asks not whether a person who carries has any diminished capacity, but just whether he is present in a place where alcohol is. This is a ridiculous standard.

I invite the Governor to confiscate the keys of every person who drives to such a restaurant, only to be returned those keys upon successfully passing a sobriety test.

The issue about serial numbers is the same. If I were to mass produce illegal arms without serial numbers to supply the illegal market, I don't think I'd be too exercised about whether I have serial numbers or not.

On the other hand, if I am technically inclined, and want to tinker, and maybe tinker with my guns, or see if I could make one, I all of a sudden need a lawyer to figure out what I should file, and when.

Ghost Guns are Not The Problem.

The people who respect the law, the legal gun-owners, are not the problem.

This bill does not address in any way those who might commit crimes using guns. It just makes it more likely that the otherwise legal gun-owner will be made a criminal.

How about leaving the legal gun owner alone, and promoting programs that actually result in fewer criminals? How about encouraging marriage, and the return to church, and the celebration of the American experiment, and life in general.

It's one of the reasons we own guns. We like what has been created, but we are scared of the over-reach of the state.

For instance, people talk about medically assisted death. If you came for a depressed child who somehow got the state's sanction to kill himself (it has come to this in Canada), a person might just want to resist that, with arms. The same if you came to mutilate my child. And if, as President Biden suggests, I would be foolish to resist his F-15 with my 1911 (I don't have an AR-15), then maybe I deserve the right to be that fool. Maybe there is a line. Maybe we won't approach it as long as we trust the people to be armed.

The Governor recently came out for Women's Reproductive Rights. Do you think the Chinese could have forced abortions at the rate it did under the One Child Policy if the citizens were armed?

Every dead person is a tragedy. But tens of millions died in the last century for inability to defend themselves. We can't let the millions of dead be just a statistic. We hold arms to secure an idea and an ideal. We hold them to protect our families, on the way home, in parks, even in restaurants. We hold them to avoid the next Holocaust. We hold them because sometimes the police just can't get to us in time.

We hold them to preserve and protect the rights too many of us have come to take for granted.

We understand that a gun is dangerous, that its purpose is death, and this is not to be taken lightly.

But it's purpose is also to avoid death, to allow us to celebrate life, free from the interference of others and an over-reaching state.

We hold them because there will always be another Pol Pot, or Mao, or Stalin. We hold them because they are what gave us what we have.

To close, and quote Sting again:

There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence.

But maybe it's not all about common sense.

Perhaps we can trust each other, trust that we are not all about power, trust that we can be responsible, trust that it is not rage that drives most of us, trust that those who would carry actually care, that they are as human as those who don't, and that it is our humanity that binds us.

Your answer to the “mainstream” media, particularly the CT Post and WICC.