Legalize Marijuana or Hand Over Your Guns

Let’s take just a moment and consider some fundamental paradoxes within the United States’ legal system. We like to think we are the nation of freedom, the nation of get-ahead, the nation of self-made men and women who just have to have a dream in order to thrive. With the Constitution as our founding document, including the Bill of Rights which outlines express guarantees of all sorts of “inalienable” rights such as the freedom to say whatever we want, the freedom to own guns, the freedom to worship whatever god, etc., we like to think of ourselves as a pretty clever nation. Now, nevermind the extent to which those rights have been watered down and whittled away over the years, because what I want to consider is a sort of flaw in our thinking when it comes to what we claim we believe (as opposed to what we actually allow our “servants” to write into law and enforce).
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Getting On The Terrorist Watch List

After reading a report earlier this week which references various law enforcement pamphlets which detail behaviours of potential terrorists (“If you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force”), I was quite naturally inspired to look back over the body of writing I have produced during the last year or so and see how I compare to their profiling attempts. Now, taking the body of work as a whole, I think it is safe to say that I have a pretty weighty terrorist inclination. But if you look at any individual essay, I have to say I come up short. There are ones which repeatedly reference the Constitution, for example, but leave out any mention of driving being a right rather than a privilege. There are places where I state that Americans have the right to bear arms, but neglect to mention that I am essentially a loner. I know that I can do better, and I am here to prove it.

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