October 22, 2017
Dear Mr. Adams,
I have always admired you as a man of science and not of superstition. So I trust that you do not see it as an act of Providence or prophets that Mr. Jefferson and I each bore personal witness to our nation’s most recent tragedies. Perhaps like me, you see it as an inevitable product of our errors centuries ago.
Mr. Jefferson was imbibing in a caramel latte under the shadow of his likeness in Charlottesville when he saw not the tragic collision of man and machine, but of our neglect and its consequence. We were ill prepared and ill positioned centuries afore, but we might have known that slavery was such an atrocious debasement of human nature that its extirpation would open a serious source of evils—even so long hence.
And then after a fruitful weekend of Pai Gow poker at Mandalay Bay, I saw not merely the evil product of a deranged mind, but that of misplaced prepositions, bodies torn by bullets and Mr. Madison’s poor syntax. Could we not have better composed the second amendment to forbid its corruption?
I am afraid that as much as we may now be dumbfounded fathers, we may too be dumb founding fathers. I write in morbid grief for our errors of omission.
And thus for the first time in many months, I put away my VR HTC Vive to instead put again pen to parchment, to revise this document and confront the real horror that we have wrought. I understand you have put away the cane with which you use to chase millennials from your Peacefield portico to dedicate yourself to the same.
It is an act mandatory not merely for our posterity but for our nation’s continuity.
I have been sequestered in my suite for weeks. I receive visitors only after midnight. However depraved my deeds or doodads, I am comforted to know that these ladies incur no risk of corruption, and that their bump stocks are far more regulated than any AR-15. Neither prattle nor pathogen shall leave this great American city! Indeed, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, unless it is a massacre so affecting that it necessitates a constitutional remedy.
And so, I get to work. Let us reconvene at a time of your choosing. I am interested in your thoughts as much as I am Mr. Madison’s. In our defense, it is worth noting that the phrase “well-regulated” appears in the very first sentence.
I remain, your affectionate friend,
Benjamin Franklin
p.s. If our errors haunt us, you might fear for a similar tragedy to befall Boston, lest we work quickly. We may delay, but time will not.
