A barrel full of monkeying around

The police know who he is, but I can assure you, the selection committees for MENSA and Phi Beta Kappa never heard of this guy.

"This guy" is the one who caused such a ruckus on Monday, walking around the property at a local elementary school with a rifle in his hand.

Not looking to turn this into a gun control debate!  I decided just the other day, we shouldn't talk about gun control or knife control or sharpened stick control or any other sort of control except for three:  mental health control, criminal control, and stupidity control.

I don't know what to think about mental health control, frankly.  It's easy to say that people prone to violent rages or sociopathic behavior should not have weapons available, but who is to make the call?  And who is to make sure that they don't have a gun, a knife, a sharp stick?

Criminal control, easy to figure.  People who hurt people, people who take other people's lives, people who murder, rob, rape and bludgeon should be in jail and far away from the rest of us.

But this fellow the other day seems to fall into the category of not being the brightest bulb on the tree.  It turns out, this was some antique rifle he was parading around with.  At the edge of an elementary school.  At dismissal time.  I suppose he hasn't been following the news lately, because he would have heard about why this was not such a great idea.

But no one is threatening to take the man's rifle away.  I happen to have a Civil War pistol that was carried and presumably shot in that conflict by some forebear.  I can't even tell you what side he was on or who he was.  But if I were foolish enough to brandish that weapon under the same circumstances as he did his rifle, I would expect to be dealing with some irate and scared parents, school administrators and police.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.  Implicit in that is the responsibility to be smart about it.