The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This fascinating book about a pioneering surgeon was especially enjoyable because it educated me about things I had never known anything about. In very readable prose the author has mixed World War I history, personal anecdotes about individual servicemen, and medical innovations in plastic surgery in just the right proportions. The extensive notes at the end testify to how thoroughly it was researched. The author holds a doctorate in the history of science and medicine. Yet the book is not the dry academic tome some historians seem to favor. It deals with a grisly subject, severe disfigurement, but maintains a light, upbeat tone, much like Sir Harold Gillies, the main figure of the book. She sticks to the subject matter of facial reconstruction without diverting too much into biography, which I appreciated. If you’re not comfortable looking at facial disfigurement, skip the photos in the midsection, but the text should pose no problems.

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Just heard another idiotic news report. “Queen Elizabeth was interned today.” I’m glad to hear she got a job as an intern. Maybe she can get hired on full time if she does a good job. What they meant to say, of course, is that she was interred. A different station reported on an earlier part of the pomp and pageantry when there was an equestrian procession. He said “Here comes the Calvary.” He meant cavalry. These are English announcers butchering their own language. I don’t want to hear any criticism of us Yanks by these limeys about our own butchering, which is at least as bad.

As a dedicated member of the American Cryptogram Association, I like to solve ciphers and I enjoy writing programs for that purpose. Regular readers will have read some of my posts on the subject. Recently I tried an experiment to modify my programs to make them faster. It didn’t work very well.

In its simplest form computer solving can be described as two steps: 1. try a decryption and 2. test the result. This process is repeated, usually until a solution is found or the user stops it. It can be done by running through a word list or by randomized guesswork such as hillclimbing. My idea to speed it up is very simple: don’t test the entire decryption; just test the beginning.

The way my programs usually do the testing is to score every tetragram (4-letter group) for its frequency in English or other target language. The more high-frequency tetragrams in the trial decryption, the more likely it is to be near the solution. I found that if I just test the first four tetragrams instead of the whole thing, it does save time. I found a strict cutoff score that allows 99.3% of valid decryptions through for a full decryption, but cuts off up to 90% of false decryptions depending on the cipher type. I thought this would improve my solving time by 90%. It didn’t turn out that way.

The first problem is that this method doesn’t reduce the number of decryptions, only the number of test cycles. For many cipher types, it is necessary to decrypt the entire thing before you have the beginning to test. It turns out that the decryption phase takes longer than the testing phase. The time savings were there on several types, but so minimal that it wasn’t wroth it. Remember, it’s not 100% accurate, so that means that every now and then it would cut off a valid solution, too, which is a limitation.

The second problem is that this only works for solving methods that rely on a 100% solution. For example if the decryption method is to decrypt using a word list as a key source, you expect that when the correct key word is tried, the solution will be 100% valid English, including the beginning. It is safe to assume that if the beginning has bad tetragrams, one should go on to the next key. But if one is using hillclimbing, that is not so. You might make a change to the key that improves the overall score, and should be preserved, but doesn’t necessarily produce good text at the beginning. My method won’t work at all on a hillclimber, simulated annealing, etc. It also doesn’t work on types with numerals or with Playfair unless your frequency data is modified to deal with the numbers or extra X’s for the same reason.

I tried solving the first problem by extending the method to the decryption process. For many types, such as Vigenere, it is possible to just decrypt the beginning. So I did that, decrypting only the beginning and testing it. There were some savings in time, but surprising to me, it was only around 1% and still had the same risk of cutting out the valid solution. Apparently interrupting the normal loop of decryption to test the start slows down the whole process, especially for a type like Vigenere, that produces quite a few valid-looking beginnings even with wrong keys. The cost of the extra test cycle balanced out the savings from culling out some full decryptions.

Another limitation in the method is that it doesn’t work at all with transposition types. They have the same number of high-frequency letters as normal text, so nearly every trial decryption will pass the test and go on for the full-length decrypt/test cycle. In the end I decided to chuck the whole idea. It still seems like it ought to be possible to streamline the trial decrypt/test process. One way to do it it if you have a crib is to test whether the crib appears in the trial decryption. Similarly, if your decryption process involves reducing the text to a simple substitution, test to see if the pattern of the crib appears.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bradbury, the author, and this book are both iconic symbols of science fiction. But the book really isn’t science fiction per se. As Bradbury himself says in the introduction, it’s myth. A bugaboo of mine is how booksellers and even libraries lump together science fiction and fantasy. I consider them separate genres. This book would clearly fall into the fantasy half since there is very little science in it. Bradbury makes little effort to portray Mars in ways that are remotely plausible to today’s audience. It is covered with water-filled canals, has sufficient oxygen for people to breathe, and is already populated by happily married Martian couples much resembling humans only with crystal hair and triangular doors. It often sounds silly, and in truth, it mostly is.

But the book isn’t intended to be hard science fiction like, say, The Martian. Bradbury uses Mars as metaphor, recreating the despoliation of the Americas by the Europeans, for how our earthly society could be so much better, or so much worse. Many later sci-fi books have done the same thing, but this book paved the way. It is rather amusing at times, as well as disappointing to some extent, to see how inaccurately the author foresaw the future. Of course it’s easy to see in hindsight, but Bradbury posits the families of the future to look mostly like the families of middle America in the 1950s. Women are happy to stay in the kitchen and go to the beauty parlor. All astronauts are men and most of them smoke cigars. Vehicles on Mars are all gas hogs with fossil fuel rocketed up from Earth. Come on, Ray, electric cars have been around since the 1890s. You could have done better even back then. By today’s standards, the book seems rather juvenile, but it deserves its place in the pantheon of pioneering science fiction.

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We’re in the middle of a heat weave here in California. Almost every weather reporter has been talking about triple digits. The idiocy that I can’t stand is when they say – and most of them do – that “it’s going to be over triple digits tomorrow.” No, it’s not. Triple digits is the range 100 to 999. To be over triple digits it would have to be at least 1000 degrees. What they mean is it’s going to be over double digits, or it’s going to be in triple digits. They don’t know the difference between over and in. I think the concept is over their heads when it should be in.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read Ng’s second book five years ago and found this one to have the same strengths and weaknesses. It begins with a mystery. Lydia, a teenage girl, drowns in a lake one evening, apparently alone. Was it an accident? A murder? A suicide? But for the next 200 or so pages the author leaves that mystery alone and begins an overlong and plodding history of Lydia’s dysfunctional family. The theme is clearly people’s failure to tell others their true feelings and thoughts and how that can cause harm. The mystery is explained at the end and it’s a rather clever twist I didn’t foresee.

Before that, though, the author paints a depressing story of what she seems to be suggesting is racism toward Asians (although she uses the term Orientals in keeping with the custom of the times depicted). I grew up in the fifties and sixties, the time frame in that part of the book, and found it to be an inaccurate portrayal, displaying a rather whiny victim mentality. Just like with the other book, I nearly gave up on it halfway through, and, like the other one, was eventually glad I didn’t. Still, in the end it felt more like a completed school assignment than an enjoyable read.

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Brace for Impact is now available on Amazon both as an ebook and a paperback.  Download it now. Just click on the image.

A big thank you to all my fans for supporting my writing.

Cliff Knowles fans, you’ve been waiting a long time for a new Cliff Knowles Mystery. It’s on its way. I’ll let you know when it’s available. Here’s the cover as a tease. I’ll be sending out a notice to my mailing list.

I just updated my music playlists. You know how great it feels to discover a new performer and acquire a bunch of new music? Well, I came across Ethan Leinwand and watched his excellent long video The History of Barrelhouse Blues Piano. I had to have this music, so I found his website and bought two CDs. That inspired me to update the playlists on my phone, so I ripped the CDs, bought some other songs I’d been meaning to add, and went back through my old songs that I’d removed from the playlists because I’d gotten tired of them. I found several I wanted to reinstate. So with this new batch of songs, I deleted some of the old stuff from the playlists (but not from my phone or computer) and added the new stuff.

I thought you might be interested in the changes. I’m listing only the removals and the adds, not the entire list. First the additions.

Now the removals (although they may come back when I’m no longer tired of them).

The entire list consists of 438 unique songs at the moment, although I spread them over three playlists and some of the songs are on more than one playlist. The total number of songs I play from beginning to end, including repeats, is 520. If you want to see that for comparison, I posted the previous list earlier, click here.

Magpie by Elizabeth Day
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A young couple living the life in London takes in another woman out of necessity. Will the man’s fidelity be tested? After reading several chapters into the book, I was fully prepared to dismiss it as typical chick lit about a man taking advantage of his female partner, with the woman eventually screwing up her courage and dumping the cad, teaching him a lesson in the process. It had all the female author markings, like constant descriptions of what the women were wearing. I had to look up numerous fashion terms. I now know what a Breton top is (a white sweater with thin, black, horizontal stripes) and boyfriend-style jeans (baggy, oversized, worn looking ones). A male author would have just written, “she wore a striped sweater and baggy jeans.”

But along comes Part 2 and the first big plot twist gave me a jolt. Wow! This is not what it seemed. I realized it could turn dark quickly, and it did. I’m always a bit skeptical of the unreliable narrator trick since it’s so overdone, but this had an original edge to it. You never know whom to trust, all the way to the very end. The suspense builds deliciously. It’s a clever plot and the writing is quite good, too. If you get a little bored at the beginning, stick with it. I’m glad I did. I’d give it 4 1/2 stars if they allowed it in Goodreads.

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The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rinehart truly deserves her epithet as the American Agatha Christie. This story is a classic locked-room mystery. An old woman is found dead in her room that is tightly sealed and guarded by a nurse outside the door. It’s a traditional Victorian style house with many rooms, family members, servants, and regular visitors who may or may not have motives. Nurse Hilda Adams is the protagonist cum detective. The writing is sharp, old-fashioned, and refreshingly free of swearing and gore. The plot is convoluted and far-fetched. I doubt anyone figured it all out until the final reveal but I managed to guess one small piece in advance. It may be too tame and complex for some, but I enjoyed it.

The author does have one original stylistic trait that I found interesting: overt foreshadowing. For example, Hilda would meet someone and the author would write something like “She would later describe the person to the inspector as looking ill and upset,” thus suggesting that this physical state is important to the mystery. Or maybe you’re supposed to wonder if Hilda is mistaken or even intentionally describing the person inaccurately. She could have written that Hilda met the person and he looked ill and upset. Why write that she later told the inspector at that point? She could mention it later when Hilda actually talks to the inspector. The point is to alert the reader that this is a clue (or maybe a red herring!) She’d begin a chapter with “Mrs. Fairbanks was murdered on Saturday night.” At that point in the story, it was still Saturday morning and the author proceeds to write about everything that happened on Saturday, but you’re forewarned that you’d better pay attention to where everyone is at every point because you know the murder is about to happen. These are not spoilers because you are told very early on who is going to die. You lose the surprise element to an extent from the foreshadowing, but instead you get a sort of foreboding suspense which is at least as entertaining.

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The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I am very much interested in the subject matter, or at least I thought I was. But the writing in this book was so atrocious I couldn’t finish it. Halfway through I gave up. The author is a chatterbox and fills the pages with digressions and blather. I expected a serious discussion of the various scripts mentioned in the title along with many illustrations and comparisons of the unique features of each. Instead we get the author’s opinions about almost everything backed up with nothing more than “It’s obvious that …” or “Everyone agrees that …” except it’s not obvious to me and I doubt everyone agrees.

The chatty informal tone is totally inappropriate and her meanderings make it hard to follow her points. She uses metaphors mercilessly and is constantly telling us what she is going to tell us instead of just telling it. Here’s an example from page 42 shortly after she’s told us a few paragraphs earlier that Linear B is of little interest since it’s been deciphered:

Earlier I mentioned Linear B – let’s talk about it, at least for a bit. The truth is Linear B isn’t of all that much interest to us, since it’s been deciphered. For now, we’ll spare it only a few measly lines. Though we’ll come back to it, I promise, since it’ll be of help when we look at the process of deciphering scripts. So then, Linear B.

Not only is it repeating what she’s just told us, but she takes an entire paragraph to tell us that she’s going to start writing about something. Just start writing about it, for Pete’s sake! You’ve already used up those “few measly lines.” This can’t be explained away by a bad translation.

She punctuates the text with pop culture references and compares rocks and clay tablets to iPhones and bedsheets. She’s also dismissive of all opinions that differ from her own. She typically says things like “this is generally referred to as X but really it is Y” without a convincing explanation as to why conventional terminology is wrong. She mentioned some Japanese term and said you could tell what it means just from the sound of it. No, I couldn’t, and I speak some Japanese. You get the idea. She’s a perfect example of Often Wrong But Never in Doubt.

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Deep Water by Emma Bamford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book, but perhaps not for the same reasons as most other reviewers who did. I found the descriptions of life aboard a sailboat to be the best part of the book. The sense of adventure, romance, and self-reliance are evoked very eloquently. The author obviously knew a great deal about boats and sailing and I loved that part of it. I used to devour Horatio Hornblower books, reveling in the minutiae of all that was necessary to know in order to sail and stay safe. She conveyed the danger and uncertainties that go along with that lifestyle just as well. It reminded me of the old saw that the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys it and the day he sells it.

On the other hand, I did not get the sense of foreboding or suspense that the cover blurb and many reviewers mention. It seemed like a pretty nice travelogue for the first two-thirds of the book, a vacation in a tropical paradise. Even when things start to go wrong, you get the sense that they’re fixable. Another detraction was that the two main characters aren’t very likeable, or at least, not very sympathetic. They make some very bad decisions. In fact, none of the characters were particularly likeable. When you don’t care much what happens to the characters, it’s hard to maintain a sense of suspense.

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Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but I also felt it really should have been two books. In a way it was. One book is the saga of Marion Stone, the narrator, the illegitimate son of a nun in Ethiopia. He is raised in a hospital there along with his identical twin brother Shiva. Marion becomes a surgeon. The story of his family, his career, the lives and trials and tribulations of his extended hospital family are engaging and beautifully told. The book is worth it for that alone.

The second book is really a collection of medical stories, many no doubt true, perhaps some experienced by the author, a surgeon, or read about, and others probably imagined. These are fascinating and equally enjoyable, at least for me. My one complaint is that they were crammed into one book instead of two. The book is too long, and the plot of the saga is convoluted too often in order to fit in some unusual medical tidbit or suspenseful life-saving surgery. There’s a limit as to how many times I can suspend my disbelief. Even so, I can recommend the book.

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Cold Snap by Marc Cameron
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Two stars may seem like a put-down, but in the Goodreads systems, that’s labeled as “It was OK.” I don’t have major complaints about the book or its style beyond the fact that I just couldn’t get into it. I got halfway through before I realized I was reading it out of a sense of obligation rather than enjoyment. You know, I’ve checked it out from the library and I chose it, so I should be reading it. I had trouble following all the different characters and plots that didn’t seem to be connected. The opening scene was great, but then that was dropped from the plot. Apparently it was just a hook. So I gave up and stopped halfway through.

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In my last post I mentioned that Holmes could be sentenced more harshly than Balwani because the judge could take into account evidence from all the counts charged, even the ones of which she was acquitted. This practice seems unfair to some and is a recent controversy in legal circles. A recent editorial by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers’ organization urged the Supreme Court to make it illegal in the Osby case. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case and it remains legal in all twelve federal circuits.

The federal sentencing guidelines mandate that all relevant conduct proved at trial shall be considered by the sentencing judge. Proof need only be by a preponderance of the evidence and the sentencing judge is the one who determines that. So even if a jury finds that a crime wasn’t proved beyond a reasonable doubt doesn’t mean that it wasn’t proved by a preponderance of the evidence or that she didn’t do it. The Holmes case is a perfect example. One juror has said the jury acquitted her of the patient-related counts because they felt she didn’t intend to provide them false test results. But that’s not an element of the offense. To be guilty she only needed to have knowingly provided false statements on which the patients relied and which resulted in their harm. If the juror is right, then the jury misunderstood the instructions.

In broader terms, though, holding people responsible for foreseeable harm they cause is a long-held and standard practice in the law, and I believe rightly so. This is true in both criminal law and civil law. The felony murder rule is a good example. If person A conspires with person B to rob a bank and in the course of the robbery B murders someone, A is guilty of the murder too. This is true even though murder requires a mens rea, or guilty mental state, i.e. forming the intent to murder. B’s mens rea is considered adopted by A when they conspire.  In effect, the law is saying once you choose to commit a crime, you take responsibility for everything bad that happens, even if you didn’t intend it or personally do it, at least if a reasonable person could have anticipated the possibility.

On the civil side a good example is the eggshell skull rule. If person A punches person B in the stomach and B falls down and cracks his head open and dies or is rendered a paraplegic, A is civilly liable for the death and the medical expenses. This is true even if B had an unusually fragile skull and even if A was merely negligent in knocking him down. This applies generally to all torts. Even if A did not expect person B to die from a stomach punch, it is foreseeable that severe injury or death could result from being knocked down. In short, if you intentionally do a bad thing, you pay the price at law for the results. You take your chances on how bad it’s going to be. It’s a necessary policy to deter all bad conduct. It also would not be good policy to allow a defendant to escape punishment by claiming he or she “didn’t mean to.”

Another way of viewing it is to consider the established roles of judge and jury. Other than the death penalty in some sates, the jury is not a sentencing body; it is only a fact-finding body. The court, i,e. the judge, with help from the supporting staff (like U.S. Marshals in federal cases), decide the sentence and at least in federal cases must consider all relevant conduct. This could even include behavior during trial such as lying, disrupting proceedings, etc. that aren’t necessarily crimes, or at least not charged crimes. Sentencing is a judge’s prerogative and always has been.

Some people are having trouble reconciling the verdicts in the cases of Elizabeth Holmes and Sonny Balwani. I don’t see a problem with the verdicts, and this explanation may help you understand them.

Both were charged with twelve counts of federal crimes. Counts one and two were conspiracy counts – one conspiring to defraud investors and the other to defraud doctors and patients. Both were convicted of the first count. Only Balwani was convicted of the second. They acquitted Holmes on the second count. That’s the only inconsistency that’s difficult to explain, since the allegation was that they conspired together, but the explanation given below on the remaining counts sheds light on it.

All the other counts were wire fraud counts. Six of those were for defrauding investors and three were for defrauding doctors or patients. One of the patient counts was thrown out by the court in the Holmes case due to a technical error by the prosecution, so Holmes was not tried on that one. Holmes was acquitted of the other two patient counts. Balwani was later convicted of all three, so I presume the prosecutors corrected their error on that one count. A juror from Holmes’s trial has said that the jury did not think Homes intended to provide patients with bad results, i.e. to defraud them. Knowing there could be problems with the test is not enough. She also did not communicate with the doctors or patients directly, thus the doctors or patients did not rely on her statements, a necessary element of the offense. Apparently the jury in Balwani’s case found he did. This can be explained by evidence showing different levels of involvement by the two defendants, or by different evidence presented in Balwani’s trial. One important witness testified only in Balwani’s trial.

That leaves the six investor counts. Holmes was convicted of three while Balwani was convicted of all six. But Holmes was NOT acquitted on those other three. The jury deadlocked on those. So it is not really a significant difference there. For all we know the deadlock was 11 – 1 for conviction on those remaining three counts. There may have been one or two jurors with a bit more skepticism than others on that jury. In addition, different investors heard different presentations and communicated via phone or email to different extents with the two defendants, so it is really quite normal for one to be found guilty and the other not on any specific charge.

Holmes is scheduled to be sentenced in October, Balwani in Novemer. I believe she may actually get a longer sentence, primarily because she testified. She denied the charges on the stand and did not accept responsibility. To the contrary, she testified falsely, obstructing justice. The same judge heard the evidence in both cases and may very well find her conduct was more egregious than his even though she was guilty on fewer counts. He can even take into account the evidence of harm to patients and doctors despite her acquittal on those counts. Even if he accepts that she did not intend to provide false results, there was plenty of uncontradicted evidence that her actions or negligence caused the harm during the course of her crime. Unintended harm, if it’s reasonably foreseeable, can be used in sentencing. I doubt he will cite that as contributing to his sentencing decisions, but it’s difficult for him to dismiss it entirely in his thinking.

Here are the answers to the puzzles in my last post. All of these involve words formed by the odd and even letters of each of the examples.

TRIENNIALLY is the longest English word in which all the odd-numbered letters spell a word (TINILY) and the even ones do, too (RENAL). In this case, both spell the words forward, but other examples do not. FURRINESS, BALLOONED, and FLEETNESS are the next longest ones with this property.

FRIENDS has this same trait, but with a twist. The two odd/even words, FINS and RED have letters in alphabetical order. FINS in forward order, RED in reversed.

SPOILED has the same trait except its words SOLD and PIE both have letters in reverse alphabetical order.

SINNING is interesting in that its internal words SNIG and INN have the alphabetical orderings reversed/forward, but it also has the property that SNIG (which is a British slang term) also spells a word backward (GINS).

The longest word I’ve found where the two words are both spelled backward and in alphabetical order is UTOPIA (IOU, APT) if you count IOU as a word. If you don’t care about the alphabetical order, the longest words I’ve found with both odd/even words spelled in reverse order is THICKEST (SKIT, TECH) and GIANTISM (STAG, MINI) although there were dozens of words of this length with one word forward and one backward. I may have overlooked other examples.

The three words in the title are all odd. They have unique characteristics. Try to guess what they are. I’ll give you some hints and in a few days I’ll post the answers.

Hint 1: Each is the longest English word with a particular trait.

Hint 2:  the latter two words’ traits are each unique at that length, i.e. no other English words of that length has those traits.

Hint 3: Friends has two other words of the same length with its trait:  innings and moonset

Hint 4: Afield and heists, as well as several other words, have a related property.  The word sinning has yet another, if you’re British.

Hint 5: the traits of these words are related but each differs from the others except as indicated in Hints 3 and 4. There are multiple shorter words that share the same traits with all of these.

Go ahead and put your guess in the comments section.

Anyone following the news in the U.S. will be aware of two recent horrific mass shootings, one racially motivated one in Buffalo and one slaughter of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. Both were committed by disturbed teenage males. Since that time there have been two significant changes in gun laws. First, the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York’s restrictive gun law unconstitutional, effectively wiping it off the books. The other was a federal law adding new restrictions to gun purchases and giving aid to states who pass “red flag laws”.

America is something of a pariah in the developed world for its archaic gun laws, and understandably so. We suffer many times the per capita gun deaths of nearly every other developed country. But there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about our gun laws. The question I hear asked the most often by talking heads on TV is “Why is America so out of step with the rest of the world on guns?” That has an easy answer and it’s the answer to almost every question critics put up: The Second Amendment.

It’s right there in the Constitution that Americans have the right to keep and bear arms. Legislatures can’t overrule the Constitution by passing laws. Laws that restrict that right keep getting struck down by the courts. The only real solution is to amend the Constitution and that’s politically impossible since it is very difficult to do even for very popular policies. Let’s examine for a moment why we have that right in our Constitution. America was born in revolution. It was oppressed by an English king and fought for its freedom by arming itself. Americans wanted to make sure that could never happen again, so they made sure they would always have the right to take up arms against their own government. It’s a stupid, short-sighted provision passed in the heat of passion out of hatred for England. Blame lies at least as much with King George (and for that matter all the European colonial powers) as it does with America’s founders, but there it is. Personally, I believe it was unwise to make the Constitution so difficult to modify, but I also believe it is wrong to expect courts to disregard its plain language because they disagree with it.

People on both sides of “the gun issue” are right and both are wrong. The pro-gun people are right that they have a constitutional right. They’re wrong when they say things like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” or that restrictive gun laws wouldn’t prevent these mass shootings or gun deaths in general. Both are proved false by the death rates in other countries that have enacted such laws and restricted the number of guns. Those on the opposing side are wrong when they say it shouldn’t be legal to own guns, especially assault weapons. The whole point of the Second Amendment was to make sure Americans could take up weapons of war to fight an oppressive government, not for personal protection, hunting, or recreation. However, they are right that the court could interpret the Second Amendment differently. I haven’t yet mentioned its preliminary language: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, …” A progressive court could very well interpret that to mean that the keeping of arms is guaranteed only to the extent it is part of a militia dedicated to protecting a free state, not individuals. So those assault weapons should be part of a well-regulated militia of a state. The Supreme Court has not adopted that view, but it could, and many constitutional scholars do.

The only practical way America will ever be able to change this is to elect Presidents and Senators who will appoint and confirm multiple Supreme Court justices who have this view.