We hold this truth to be self-evident: that you do not tell something with three hundred teeth what it may keep.
THE AMENDMENT, AS WRITTEN
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
OPENING STATEMENT
I am going to keep swimming while I talk.
I don’t have a choice. If I stop moving, water stops going over my gills, and I drown. So I will be brief, and I will be moving, and you will be watching the water behind me instead of listening. That’s fine. Everyone does.
I am a white shark. You say great white. I don’t mind the adjective. Sixteen feet, when I am being modest. My family has been in the ocean for four hundred million years.
Sharks are older than trees.
I would like you to sit with that the next time someone calls a tree ancient.
I was asked to give testimony on the Second Amendment. I said I would need to read it first. I have read it. It is one sentence long. I have notes.
ARTICLE I: ON A WELL REGULATED MILITIA
Every year a number of us leave the coast of California and swim out into the open Pacific, about halfway to Hawaii, to a patch of water with nothing in it. No reef. No seals. No reason any human has been able to find.
The scientists who tracked us there named it the White Shark Café. They put tags on us, at real expense, and followed the tags out across a thousand miles of ocean, and found us, and watched the signals dive and rise and dive, and wrote papers. They still do not know what we do there.
That is a well regulated militia. We assemble at a time of our choosing, at a place you cannot find, for reasons we decline to disclose. We are regulated by the ocean. The ocean regulates very well.
Nobody at the Café has ever been asked for identification.
One of us was tagged off Cape Cod in 2012. The people tracking her named her Mary Lee, a fan gave her an account on the internet, and within a couple of years she had more followers than the town she was tagged off. She never posted once. The fan posted for her, off the pings her tag sent up whenever her fin broke the surface: where she was, which beach to stay off that week.
That is the only regulation I have ever seen work. Give the shark a tag and let somebody else do the talking.
ARTICLE II: ON THE SECURITY OF A FREE STATE
Take the top predator out of a sea and the sea goes wrong.
I won’t walk you through it. Your scientists have. They have written a great many papers about what happens below the top when the top is gone, and the papers all end the same way, which is with a smaller number of everything and a larger number of jellyfish.
I take the slow ones, and the sick ones, and the ones who weren’t paying attention. That is why the seals off California are as fast as they are. The seals have never once thanked me.
I am the security. I am not the threat to the free state. I am the reason it is still a state and not a soup.