This delicate sculpture is unstable.  

It’s made of bits and pieces of different guns produced a century apart; the detritus of once powerful machines.  It's disjointed and cobbled together; it feels like today.

Thin slices from the stock of an 1891 Argentine Mouser rest on top of the gas tube of an AR15 which sinks into a chunk of a gun stock and is supported by a cast off gun spring and a shaving from another rifle stock.  

An AR-15’s gas tube utilizes a portion of the expanding gas produced when a round is fired, which is then redirected to push a mechanism which cycles the action, allowing the spent casing to be ejected and a new round to be chambered. The gas tube is the key component in the firearm's "gas-operated" system that enables automatic reloading.  The Magpul PMAG D-60 AR/M4 Gen3 holds 60 rounds of ammunition and its innovative polymer drum magazine works with all AR15/M4 compatible weapons. A standard AR-15 with a barrel length of 16 to 20 inches and chambered in .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO can effectively hit targets up to 600 yards away.  These are mind boggling technological leaps in firearms from the days of muskets in which our founding fathers lived and used ink wells to write documents.

In 1789 when the Second Amendment was penned, muskets and flintlocks were at the forefront of firearm technology.  These guns held one round and could fire lead balls once or maybe twice per minute by someone with a fair amount of experience. In the hands of a talented marksman, the effective range of a long gun was like 50-100 yards. Tacticians of the time suggested that a volley of musket fire be shot when opponents were 25-50 yards away; hence the old saying “don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”  

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, there was no standing national army and no police force as we know them. Scholars have described the Second Amendment as a bribe to southerners in order to get them to approve the Bill of Rights (first 10 Amendments to the constitution written by James Madison).  Earlier, in the Mid 1700s, Quakers led an abolitionist movement in the North. From the founding of this country, Southerners feared Northerners would not protect plantation owners from slave revolts and they demanded the Second Amendment as insurance for their slice of the economic system that depended on enslaved workers.  Correctly, Southern politicians saw an existential threat to their wealth and power.

America in 2024 is, technologically and socially, wildly different from the days of our country’s founding fathers. This moment feels delicate and unstable.  American citizens reach back to our core texts only to find a faint reflection of ourselves.  We hunt and peck out our favored verses of scripture from our favored translation, and match it up with our favored part of the Second Amendment, and our favored lines from our founding fathers and our favored slices of history.  From these bits and pieces we patch together a world view that we defend with conviction.  We have trouble agreeing on facts. We live in an atmosphere of fear.  We demonize the “other.” We gaslight one another. Very truly, I say to you, it is an unstable and precarious time in the land of the free and brave.