Good Day Citizens and Welcome to this week's podcast edition of The Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Yep, that's it. I think the essay that I deliver in the Jefferson Watch this week is maybe the most important one that I've ever written.

It's time.

We spent a lot of this show answering questions from three different listeners about the Second Amendment.

And Mr. Jefferson... about the second amendment and Mr Jefferson's feelings about that.

Well, Jefferson was of course a revolutionary.

That matters and Jefferson did not write the Bill of Rights, nor really did James Madison.

Madison compiled it.

The most interesting fact of all of this, in my opinion David, is that the founding fathers in the first Congress of the

United States did not really debate the Bill of Rights. If you read histories of this and

there are a number of good ones, they kind of brushed through it. They kind of looked on it as

boiler plate or window dressing or a sop to the people or a sop to the

anti-federalists and without any really significant debate they passed these 10 remarkably potent and important amendments that became the Bill of Rights and now we spent 200 years trying to to do for them what they didn't bother to do for us, which was to explain themselves.

And so if you went around to, if you went to Berkeley and said,

what is the meaning of the Second Amendment?

You'd get X.

If you went to Selma, Alabama, and said,

what is the meaning of the Second Amendment?

You get Y.

If you went to Colorado, you'd get Z.

The founding fathers did not define their terms.

There were no footnotes to the Bill of Rights.

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