As I watch the sit-in

A vote is coming.  A vote is coming because a person struggling with lustful feelings he found repugnant got caught up in the culture wars.  He sought a champion.  He sought to be a champion.  On Sept 12, 2001, a decision was made, to call the perpetrators of that criminal act champions of a cause.  Holy warriors, not the debased thugs they were.  And so, this tormented man saw the Junior League thugs of Daesh as champions, and adopted their tactics.  And he was abetted in his quest to be a champion by a gun culture that affects potency as capacity for carnage.  That's not specifically American culture.  Most kleptocratic, autocratic and failed states (and criminal gangs) have a group of predators packing heat as a cultural ideal of empowered manhood.  The integrity of this armed caste produced a convoluted etiquette among men that cannot abide acknowledged sexual lust or behavior.  Gun culture killed the Orlando 49.  The designation of the 9/11 bombers and their exploiters as warriors, not criminals, killed the Orlando 49.  The self-loathing of a man whose cultural heritage could not abide or direct or relieve his homosexual impulses killed the Orlando 49.

And so a vote is coming.  A vote to create a caste of people who are trusted with guns, and a caste disarmed.  A vote to identify people by edict as disqualified for full citizenship.  A vote to say yes to disarming for life (disenfranchising as well) the young man with a rock of cocaine base, while preserving full citizenship for the young man with a vial of cocaine powder.  A vote too say yes to disarming the young man who calls Allah God with enough fervor to cause others discomfort, but to preserve the right of the young man who does not know God by name, but keeps evoking Him against the dreaded stranger.

Keeping guns out of the hands of people who ought not have guns is not the vote that should be taken, whether is involves universal background check, no-fly/no-buy, or good-guys with guns being the remedy against bad-guys with guns.  All such designations create, whether by edict or some pretense of due process, a cohort who regard themselves as our protectors, but, like George Zimmerman, become our tormentors.  No such cohort should exist among free men except under discipline.  So says the Second Amendment.  The vote ought be -- how to make access to that discipline consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment.  How to have a national uniform discipline of armed citizens which resembles Dumas' Musketeers and not Duvalier's Macoute.  How to encourage this body to be an enterprise of civic hospitality, not xenophobic hostility.

Last fall, I lobbied my Congressman for the second time on behalf of America Walks.  My partner on visits to five Congresspersons (VA 3, 5, 7, 8, 10) and both Senators was a sports medicine physician.  The easy access of hostile people to firearms came up in our travels.  We both agreed that hostility was the issue more than firearms.  And how to address hostility?  Get outside.  Get active.  Get engaged in the world as it is, and not insist (and let ourselves be gratified by those who let us pretend, for a fee) that the would ought and could be just the way I like it.  Infrastructure for unstructured spontaneous play and activity is the best investment Congress can make toward greater civility, satiety, and safety in the lives of the people.