First, I will *consider* giving up my guns when government does. I only consider it, because I am a weak person, and I need all the advantages I can get when it comes to protecting myself and my family, and resisting tyranny.

I demand that the government give up their guns because government officials *have* misused them, and they *will* again, in the future. Officials are people too, and no amount of training will change that.

The only difference between a government official and other citizens is that an official can deliberately murder someone, or even a group of people, and get away with it, with little or no repercussion. This happened at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, when an unarmed woman, holding her baby, was shot in the head; it happened at Waco, Texas, when dozens of children were killed in a botched media performance that was designed to justify funding; and it happens on a regular basis, when SWAT teams are sent to deal with minor drug possession crimes. (Whether or not people die in these, people are nonetheless terrorized, and guns are the main tool of terror.)

I would go a step further, and point out that the militia clause in the Second Amendment particularly implies that any arm that a government official can own, ought to be available to the average citizen.

Second, Senator Orrin Hatch, in a study on gun control for the Senate, discovered an interesting fact: that there is *less* crime when anyone, regardless even of their mental state or criminal background, is allowed to carry a firearm; and that, all the regulations in place have done nothing to prevent gun crimes or gun deaths.

Thus, if you desire to have less gun crime, I would encourage you to take your Second Amendment duty seriously: train in the use of the AR-15 rifle, and the M1911 or the M9 Barretta handguns, which are the standard-issue weapons of our military, and always carry a handgun with you, to be prepared for the possibility that you might need it to defend yourself and others.

And be prepared to fight tyranny at home, if necessary, or to repel an invasion from enemy forces, or to fight enemies abroad (such as those in Germany). Boot camp will not give you enough time to use your weapons! assuming that you have time to be sent to Boot Camp. *Now* is the time to learn to use your weapons.

After all, if you are a male of the age of 18 to 45, you are a member of the United States militia, and even if you aren’t, you can freely volunteer militia service anyway.

What I think is even more interesting is how tragedy, and death, are kind of synonymous with romance across all sorts of love stories. Lifelong love and functional couples are few and far between. If you look at the great love stories across time, at the end of the day, most of them really are tragedies (albeit not quite as boneheaded ones as R&J is). And yeah, conflict brings drama and yadda yadda yadda, but in large part, love seems to be defined by its absence rather than its presence.

Love the picture in the header – very evocative. And, I pretty much agree with what you said about Jordan’s writing style. I truly think he started writing just to please himself around book 6. This was good for him but not necessarily good for the reader, but hey, nobody could put any reins on him by then and he already had enough money for a lifetime. Just as a sidelight, Beethoven did not have an unfinished symphony (There is some research that points to the possibility that he was considering a 10th symphony but there are not even any piano sketches. One musicologist mistakenly intrepreted an unfinished sketch for a string quartet as the beginning of a 10th symphony but that has been put to rest. Perhaps, you are thinking of Schubert’s 8th symphony, sometimes called the “Unfinished”. But Schubert was happy with the first two movements as they were and used the third as the basis to his Rosamunde overture, then went on to create a glorious 9th symphony. Gustave Mahler left a symphony unfinished – his 10th – and it has been completed (with limited success) in several editions by at least 2 subsequent composers. However, your point is well taken. No one can complete something the way the original author or composer could. The best we can hope for is the same result Sussmayer achieved when he completed Mozart’s great requiem mass postumously.