Obama's charisma needs details on health, guns

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And then there is the matter of guns, accentuated by the horrifying massacre at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where I have attended several weekly newspaper conferences. I know some readers will disagree with me, but I think it is time to end the situation in which candidates feel they must walk on eggshells because our policy is held hostage by the National Rifle Association. We need enforceable national regulation of access to handguns.

I understand the importance of firearms to hunters. In the Army I qualified as marksman on the M-1 and expert on the carbine. As a boy spending summers in northern Michigan, I had a .22 rifle and did my share in attempting to eradicate what I considered to be varmints like rabbits, squirrels and woodchucks. During long hours conducting a road usage survey, several of us took turns peppering farmers' mailboxes - a woeful piece of irresponsibility that the farmers must have resented mightily. We can hope that most owners of rifles and shotguns restrict their uses to more suitable targets.

But apart from a few used in target shooting, small arms like revolvers and pistols are intended primarily to kill people or to defend oneself against being molested. There is no legitimate home use for machine guns or other assault weapons.

Then why can't we evolve a national policy, enforced by the states, of banning assault weapons and registering all handguns, limiting access to them under defined conditions? Michael Kahler of Lakeville reports he had owned a handgun that he took with him when he spent some months in Britain. A few days after his arrival, a constable called on him to register the firearm and make sure he kept it under lock and key and that the ammunition was kept under lock in a separate place. If he wanted to use the gun, he needed a permit from the police. Not a bad idea.

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It would be foolish to expect either candidate to have a precise plan now for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Rather, I should like to hear a statement of intentions - to turn over full control to the Iraqi parliament by such and such a date, after which our forces will be withdrawn on a schedule. A philosophical statement of our determination to draw Iraq's neighbors into a regional conference on security would help change the tone as we beef up the joint campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

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One of the best new books I have read in many moons is "American Creation," by Joseph Ellis, This is the retrospective evaluation by a master historian of the work of several founding fathers - Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison - written in delightfully elegant prose. Ellis concludes that their great failures were their inability to abolish slavery and to reach a satisfactory settlement with the Indians.

Several episodes were new to me, including the effort in 1790 of President George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, along with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to come to terms with the leader of the Creek Indians, Alexander McGillivray, during which McGillivray insisted on being made a brigadier general in the American army; and Ellis' conclusion that Jefferson had already been thinking as a geopolitician when he asked his aide, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition to the Pacific even before the Louisiana Purchase had become possible.

Ellis, it is plain, regards Jefferson as duplicitous. Still, his evaluation of the impact of Jefferson's opening words of the Declaration of Independence has special meaning at a time when Barack Obama has been criticized for putting too much stock in rhetoric. The lyrical lines beginning with "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," Ellis says, "were destined to become the most potent and consequential words in American history, perhaps in modern history."

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Before action there come words, sometimes noble words, that move men to act. In setting forth his vision of a fairer and more compassionate society that will again justify world respect, Obama does not achieve a magical transformation. But he could provide the inspiration whereby his fellow Americans will at least make the effort to build a new society on the hill.