Last Thursday evening, I was hosted by South Bay Open Carry to give a talk. I turned this one into a two-part talk.

I first showed an abbreviated version of my Metaphor For Governance game. The game shows - by analogy - how officials stall and waste the electorate's time, ultimately introducing what officials want and not what the electorate wants. By getting the audience to participate in a game, I show how gun rights, for instance, are stalled and ostensibly misunderstood. For a non-gun owner audience, the idea is to get them to actually experience being tricked. SBOC was gun owners, so I gave them a very abbreviated version of the concept and did not trick them, but merely explained the illustration.

The stunning part of this every time I drag this out longer for non-gun owners is that the time it takes for the non-gun owner audience to get it after being fooled is the metaphor of time wasted politically; it is generally about four or five rounds of the game before they realize they've been had. "Being had" in the audience is analagous to being had by several administrations, or several wars, or several kids in school. Decades of wasted time, politically.

For gun owners, the idea is the vital reminder that gun control does not misunderstand anything, but knows what we know about the second amendment. The metaphor - or, I should say political governance in reality - capitalizes on the concept of being subject to interpretation, or no real meeting of the minds. The point of the metaphor is that this is a political trap. While we are waiting for officials to catch up to our thinking and needs, they know them well already and simply defy them. The trap is patience and expectations.

We view this as a disconnect, but it is much more a bad faith from them. Officials in bad faith act stupid or even act inept, but they are actually quite in control of interpretation for the purpose of wasting time. The trap is in our permitting such a thing as the second amendment even being subject to interpretation. It is not, and if anyone thinks it is, then it's subject to our interpretation and not that of servants, certainly.

My Metaphor For Governance is an important concept to see in how we need to disallow this idea being so subject to interpretation of the public servants, or we will never really be free in self-rule. Examples are when our communities demand safer streets: officials institute gun control. The key is not to presume officials are inept, but to understand that they are dishonest and stalling.

The answer for gun owners is two-fold: 1) Integrity of the next candidates. 2) We do not ask them how they feel about the second amendment; we tell them how we feel about it and instruct them that if they want to be elected, they need to repeal all gun laws, please. Don't ask, tell. Republicans such as Rudi Giuliani believe in a so-called reasonable standard, and he has said regulation. Others need to be instructed, too. Not asked, told. 

Oh, and if they're currently in Congress and running for President, they need to start repealing gun laws now while they're seated in Congress. Show us yer stuff. The fact is that they need not fear alienating anti-gun voters; they're not really in large enough numbers. Gun owners are, even without a so-called gun lobby.

[Gun owners need to register to vote and get the hell out and vote!! No more of this refusal to vote because we don't have the perfect candidate. Nominate and elect the best one we have, instruct them on one thought: with the repeal of all gun laws, the rest will take care of itself.]

I then moved on to the CPR Corollary, beginning with how objections to second amendment today are most similar to medical objections to Citizen CPR in the seventies. Our responses ought to be the same.

Thanks to Captain Eugene McCarthy LAFD for inviting me.
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