It was an 11-hour drive home today, on which I had plenty of time to think. My father's body has been cremated by now, and his wife has the ashes. He had a farm in Tennessee to which he'd planned to retire in a few weeks. She'll see that he gets there.

I should be feeling some kind of closure, but my thoughts can't collect themselves.

My father had been fighting kidney and liver cancer for some time.  The chemotherapy suppressed his immune system, and he incurred a rare infection on Friday that killed him the following day.

He thought he'd broken his leg.  He didn't know he was going to die.  Perhaps that's for the best.  I just don't know.  His passing was quiet and without struggle.

I didn't have a chance to speak to him one last time.  I was unable to tell him what I never had: that I had forgiven him for the past, that I'd learned to see good parts of him in …

It seems the Ameican Civil Liberties Union continues to cherry-pick which rights they find defensible and which they don't:

The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.

This is pretty strange for an organization that claims absolutism for other enumerated rights, as well as seeking clemency for convicted murderers and sex offenders.

It's somewhat ironic that the logistic problems inherent in the Iowa law closely mirror the geographical problems of the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

There's a lesson here, and it isn't pretty.

[Clayton County Commissioner Eldrin] Bell was one of 600-800 people attending strip club franchise owner Jack Galardi's invitation-only, annual Fourth of July party in Butts County on Saturday. Galardi's empire includes Pink Pony South, a recently opened strip club in Forest Park.

Bell said he took advantage of a firing range on Galardi's 500-acre Flovilla ranch to try out a friend's new "high caliber" handgun.

"Fire jumped out between the barrel and the cylinder [the cylinder gap] and really cauterized, burned my thumb," Bell said Monday. "It looks ugly."

–Atlanta Journal-Constitution