Rally to Restore Sanity (and Spelling)
I did something very embarrassing at the SF regional Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday.
I grew up in a family with a lot of guns. I own a few myself. I go shooting every once in a while. I think personal gun rights are important, and doubt the usefulness of both proposed and existing gun laws[1]. At the same time I think that there was a lot of absolutely crazy rhetoric coming out of gun rights groups, before the Tea Party turned it up a few notches. The traditional widely popular "cold, dead hands" phrase is iconic, in my mind anyway, of the need to add more nuance to political conversation and "take it down a notch for America".
This has bugged me for a long time, and the Rally was an opportunity for me to express this opinion, so on Saturday morning I made the following sign:
If I die, technically, you can take my guns from my cold dead hands. But the same Constitution that guarantees personal gun ownership also provides methods for electing representatives, passing regulations, and challenging those regulations. We really don't need to start talking about killing anyone. Let's be reasonable here.
Observant readers might notice a problem with this sign. I started making it at 8:00am and the rally started at 9, so I was in a hurry. Also my printer doesn't print at 14x22, the size of the posterboard that I had left over from a previous project, which meant that I had to print "tiles" of my text and paste them together. But the biggest problem is that when I laid out the text on the bottom, "representatives" and "constitutional" happened to line up with each other.
In the printed document, those words are correctly spelled. But in both lines of the text, the seam between the two tiles happened to line up over letter repetitions that made two placements "fit" when only one was correct. And I was in such a hurry to get my sign, dry the rubber cement, and leave the house that I was concentrating more on a few milimeters of registration to make the lines match than the overall position, which was totally off.
So that's how I ended up waving a misspelled sign about guns at a rally for informed, reasonable people who make fun such people.
(If I'd had more time I would have made another sign saying "Actually you can't have my guns if you take them from my cold dead hands, because my heirs are entitled to them. Unless you're a probate judge, and the guns are being sold to settle my debts. Or if you're a detective, and I died clutching the gun in the commission of a crime, and you're taking it as evidence, but that's really unlikely if you knew me.")
[1] I'm deliberately not supporting my personal opinion because I don't want to have a discussion right now about whether guns or gun laws are bad or good.
I grew up in a family with a lot of guns. I own a few myself. I go shooting every once in a while. I think personal gun rights are important, and doubt the usefulness of both proposed and existing gun laws[1]. At the same time I think that there was a lot of absolutely crazy rhetoric coming out of gun rights groups, before the Tea Party turned it up a few notches. The traditional widely popular "cold, dead hands" phrase is iconic, in my mind anyway, of the need to add more nuance to political conversation and "take it down a notch for America".
This has bugged me for a long time, and the Rally was an opportunity for me to express this opinion, so on Saturday morning I made the following sign:
If I die, technically, you can take my guns from my cold dead hands. But the same Constitution that guarantees personal gun ownership also provides methods for electing representatives, passing regulations, and challenging those regulations. We really don't need to start talking about killing anyone. Let's be reasonable here.
Observant readers might notice a problem with this sign. I started making it at 8:00am and the rally started at 9, so I was in a hurry. Also my printer doesn't print at 14x22, the size of the posterboard that I had left over from a previous project, which meant that I had to print "tiles" of my text and paste them together. But the biggest problem is that when I laid out the text on the bottom, "representatives" and "constitutional" happened to line up with each other.
In the printed document, those words are correctly spelled. But in both lines of the text, the seam between the two tiles happened to line up over letter repetitions that made two placements "fit" when only one was correct. And I was in such a hurry to get my sign, dry the rubber cement, and leave the house that I was concentrating more on a few milimeters of registration to make the lines match than the overall position, which was totally off.
So that's how I ended up waving a misspelled sign about guns at a rally for informed, reasonable people who make fun such people.
(If I'd had more time I would have made another sign saying "Actually you can't have my guns if you take them from my cold dead hands, because my heirs are entitled to them. Unless you're a probate judge, and the guns are being sold to settle my debts. Or if you're a detective, and I died clutching the gun in the commission of a crime, and you're taking it as evidence, but that's really unlikely if you knew me.")
[1] I'm deliberately not supporting my personal opinion because I don't want to have a discussion right now about whether guns or gun laws are bad or good.