The Natural Linguist

In "The Man Who Sold the Moon", author Robert Heinlein talks about property law. In the book, he talks about how a plot of land you own extends down to a dot near the center of the earth and extends up forever. He used this idea as a plot device to allow his protagonist to claim ownership of the moon by buying up great tracts of land around the equator. But I was much struck by the idea. Just think of all the things that are briefly yours as the swath of sky you own sweeps the heavens out to infinity. Just think of the complex path that swath takes when you consider the rotation of the earth on its axis, its orbital path around the sun, the movement of our solar system around the center of our galaxy, and our stately dance with the other systems in our galactic supercluster! And all the things that pass through your airspace (many at considerably faster than the speed of light, I might add) are your property for that briefest of instants. Your sovereignty over the extent of ...

So we have another shooting, this time in a theater in Louisiana. I can't stand it. I have to say this. Sorry it's long. Guns don't kill people -- not unless you bash them over the head with one. It's the bullets that do the actual tissue disruption, both epidermal and otherwise. Seriously, though, I see the same old arguments repeated every time multiple (usually) white people get shot by non-police and its predictableness somehow manages to be both sad and hilarious at the the same time. When you get right down to it, the common factor in all these occurrences is not mental illness, it is not drugs, it is not the lack of gruntlement. It is guns. That fact cannot be avoided or ignored by even the most evidence-denying partisan. Mental illness has been with us since the dawn of civilization. And many murderous attacks have been committed by both the cold, calculating sociopath and the berserk frenzy of one completely off the rails. These crimes have been greatly a...