Background on the 2nd Amendment

Let your mind run back in time, to 1789, the year the constitution was adopted.  The United States possessed an enormous territory, stretching 2000 miles from Maine to Georgia and inland for a thousand miles.  It was thinly settled in those days.  France and England were the super powers of the late eighteen century and everyone understood that one or both of  them would want to expand their power by taking over parts of the brand new United States. Nearly every settled place had seen Indian raids, banditry, pirates, French, Spanish, and lastly Redcoats.  No way the infant federal government could protect  this huge vulnerable territory with regular army soldiers.  They lacked the money, the supplies, the roads, and the shipping, to get regular army troops into position to protect the civilians from all the potential attackers.
   The Americans had just finished the Revolutionary War, where American militia had driven Redcoat regulars into flight from Concord, slaughtered them en masse at Bunker Hill, forced "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne to surrender an entire British army, and served with distinction on hundreds of battlefields.  In those days everyone knew the militia was needed for, and adequate for, protection of American civilians, anywhere up and down the length and breadth of the land.  We would raise a small regular army, but for defense of the homeland, we would rely upon the militia.
   This was the thinking behind the clause "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State...".   Militia was a bring your own gun (BYOG) thing.  In those days no state or federal government had the money to provide arms to the militia.  And it was also known in those days that plenty of land owners, patroons, and other colonial big shots were in favor of taking guns away from "the rabble" who might use them to cause trouble.  Hence "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." 
   And this worked for many years.  As late as 1940 Japanese admiral Yamamoto said "To invade the United States is impossible.  There would be a rifleman behind every blade of grass. "   America is no longer a shaky new found country clinging to the coast of a continental wilderness.  We are now the strongest country on earth with regular armed forces surely strong enough to defend the homeland. 
   But for all our modern improvements we still have reasons for citizens to want firearms.  For instance, I have black bears strolling up and down my driveway, especially during beechnut season.  Plenty of Americans live in far more dangerous places than I, and I don't see any reason to deny them firearms.   Plenty of robberies have been thwarted with the help of a gun in the cash drawer.  So have plenty of home invasions, muggings, and car jackings.
   The recent appalling  murders of school children and innocent spectators happens because we allow homicidal maniacs to run around loose until they commit an awful crime.  We used to have mental hospitals in which we confined those of unsound mind.  Unfortunately the civil rights movement of the 1960's forced their closure, and turned the inmates out into the street, where many of them still live. 

Woodsville NH 4th of July Parade.

Unloading antique farm tractor

Becca Bailey getting the truck ready.

Groovy old Woodsville building that I need to model for my HO railroad.

Last float turns around and heads for home.

I marched ( drove actually, I am getting old)  in the great Woodsville 4th of July parade.  Above are my photos.  I finally manage to get Blogger's photo uploader to work.  It was warm, 86 F according to the big thermometer on the bank.  A good time was had by all.  We had a lot more Republican candidates than we did Democrat. 

US Health care is too darned expensive

American spends 19% of GNP on healthcare.  That is twice as much as any other country in the world.  That means that American products are 19% more expensive than they might be, just to pay the workers health care. No wonder we face such a massive trade deficit with China, and nearly ever other place in the world.  Our products are too darned expensive.  And American health care costs drive up the price of our products.
Here is my list of things we ought to do about the health care cost crisis.
1.  Drug companies are ripping us off with ridiculous drug prices.  We could fix this overnight.  Simply allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, like Canada, the EU, Japan.  Many US rip off priced drugs can be bought overseas from half the US prices.  This is a federal issue.  Nothing a NH state senator can do about it. 
2.  Clamp down on the malpractice racket.  The lawyers turn every adverse outcome into a river of cash for themselves.  NH has done some good work here with the malpractice court.  We could do more.  We could pass a law stating that prescription, manufacture, and administration of any FDA approved drug or device is never malpractice, even if the FDA later withdraws their approval.  We could crack down on lawyer approved malarkey testimony in malpractice cases.  We could require that "expert" witnesses must be practicing MD's who have treated more than ten similar cases within the past year.   A lot of "expert" witness no longer practice medicine, they just travel from trial to trial testifying to whatever the lawyer wants in malpractice cases.  This is a state issue.
3.  Clamp down in ridiculous regulations.  For instance, Dartmouth Hitchcock, down in Lebanon, has the roof lined up from side to side with humongous air conditioner units.  That's because some regulator demands that the air conditioners hold hospital temperature to plus or minus 1 degree F.  That's ridiculous.  I used to run an Air Force Precision Measurement Equipment Lab  (PMEL we called it).  We got all over Base Civil Engineers because the PMEL air conditioner could not keep PMEL temperature below 95F on a hot summer day.  In actual fact, this hospital regulation is totally unnecessary.  As long as air conditioning holds the temperature down enough to prevent patient suffering, they will get well. Some of the mickey mouse regs are federal, some are state.
4.  Stop prescribing so many opioids.  The Wall St Journal says that 80% of Medicaid patients in West Virginia and Kentucky are getting prescriptions for pricey opioids.  Which gets the patients onto heroin when the opioid prescription runs out. This is a mixed issue, part federal, part state, part medical profession.
5.  Stop doing so much heroic treatment on elderly patients who are at end of life.  No matter what the diagnosis, there is always some expensive procedure (a CAT scan for instance) or operation that might extend the patient's life by a few weeks.  In many cases, the elderly patient would be happier to just go home and die quietly in bed. This is a tough issue, but we could help by enlisting the elderly patient's family in decisions to do expensive things on very elderly patients.  My mother felt strongly about this, and was glad to have her two grown sons take her to the hospital and then back home.  She managed to die quietly at home at age 91.  

Abolish ICE?

Democrats, led by their newly elected New York rep Ocasio-Cortez, are calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  
Plan A:  replace the current ICE with a newly raised border control force.  This plan just costs money, it won't change anything much
Plan B:  Abolish ICE, lay off all their personnel, sell all their vehicles, office equipment and buildings.  Don't replace them with anything.  Create open borders, anyone can enter the US, bringing in anything they please, drugs, weapons, bombs, cute young sex slaves for sale,  nuclear material, anything.  Everyone all over the world would love to live in the United States, we have made it a very attractive, pleasant, prosperous, comfortable, free place to live. After we have built it, they will come.  En masse.  Will our country remain the United States we know and love after 50 million foreigners move in, settle down, take jobs, and vote in our elections? 

College didn't used to be so darned expensive

Way back in 1968 I got out of the Air Force and went to University of Delaware.  I got an electrical engineering degree that served me well for forty years.  At the time, my veteran's benefits were enough to pay all my tuition.  Tuition was so cheap that some semesters I paid more for textbooks than I did for tuition.  They hadn't invented student loans back then. And Delaware was a good school.  I never had an employer sniff at my Delaware degree over my forty years in the workforce.  
   Now a days I wound up paying $13K a year to put youngest son thru Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  I hear that any decent public university wants $8K a year.  This is about ten times what it cost me to get thru Delaware fifty years ago.  
   I think the drastic inflation of college costs was caused by student loans.  If there is plenty of loan money to be had, the students will sign up for anything, even being deep in debt for twenty years after graduation.  All the extra money has gone into really nice college buildings, and lots of college administrators, who don't teach, they just draw their pay.

Looking after their own, NEA

Word seems to get around.  I have been a candidate for NH Senate for a little more than a week.  Today I got a letter from the National Education Association (NEA), asking me where I stand on a number of issues.  Of the five questions on their questionaire, three of them concerned teachers pay and benefits, rights to unionize, and how I felt about charter schools, a long time teacher's union bete noire. 
   Clearly NEA doesn't care about teaching children, they only care about teacher's union rights, teacher's union dues and teacher pay and benefits. 
   After working out a decent answer, I consulted with an experienced friend.  The friend suggested I just not answer the NEA questionaire, since NEA is nothing but Democrats, who will twist anything I might write to use against a Republican candidate like me.

Strict Construction versus the living Constitution

The late Supreme Court Justice Scalia was famous for his belief that cases should be decided upon the original intent of the founders.   Since the founding occurred way back in 1789, it requires some research, some history, to understand the intent of men who lived better than 200 years ago.  There have been changes in the language over that much time, but the founders intent is discoverable with only a modest effort.
   Strict constructionists feel the duty of the courts is to judge cases according to existing law, not to make new law from the bench.  If new laws are needed it is the duty of the elected legislature to vote them in, not for single judges, or small groups of judges to make up new law out of whole cloth.
   Living Constitution people say that things have changed since 1789 (true enough) which requires changes in the way we interpret the Constitution to bring it up to date.  And these changes should be made by the courts.  This view is popular with people who have not been able to muster the votes to get their changes passed by the legislature[s].  It is also popular with judges, since it puts them in the driver's seat.  And it is popular with law schools and legal pundits because it makes legal history more interesting.  In modern times it has been easier to sell new ideas to the nine justices of the Supreme Court than to sell new ideas to the general public or  to the elected legislatures.
   I hope President Trump nominates a strict constructionist to fill retiring Justice Kennedy's seat on the Supreme Court.   I don't want to live under a dictatorship of the bench.