Forget concealed carry, study martial arts instead

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision expanding the right to carry guns in public reminds me of Caine from the early-1970s television show "Kung Fu." To speak specifically to men reading this, I'll use gendered terms where genderless ones would otherwise be more fitting.

"Kung Fu" was about how to be a man. Caine walked from town to town in the Southwest of the late 19th Century looking for his half-brother. Each week he found his brother, for all men were his brothers. He had been raised by nurturing teachers. Perhaps the lesson I needed most came when one of the teachers uncharacteristically expelled another student merely for saying that strangers were never to be trusted. Caine was too clever and sophisticated to think himself better than the people who, possessed of these traits in lesser measure, looked down on him. People cannot be ranked without specifying a purpose for the ranking. A might be better than B at pole vaulting or grammar or solving differential equations or gardening, but people are incomparable in general.

Caine did not carry a gun because he was skilled at kung fu. If you are a physically capable man not subject to unusual risk but nevertheless unwilling to leave home without packing heat, maybe you should consider studying martial arts instead.

Let's require that guns be pink to dispel the deadly illusion that guns are manly.

James Lyons Walsh Albany