I am sure that the literacy rate in congress must be pretty high. I am sure they have to read a lot of bills and laws and letters, well at least what is being written about them in the paper. But to see the way members of both parties continue to pretend the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution doesn’t exist can only mean they have never really read it.

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” doesn’t mean we have the right to wear sleeveless dresses. But what is the advice of someone who was around during the drafting of the constitution?

Thomas Jefferson said in 1823, to Justice William Johnson, “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in the which it was passed.”

That is excellent advice that should be applied today. Even if you are illiterate, common sense will tell you that when the words say “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” . . . it probably means just that.