When I was in grade school they made us read Gulliver’s Travels. Now understand, I’m an avid reader. But for some reason, this book didn’t grab me. (Then again, I’m not a Jack Black fan, so I had no trouble passing on the movie version, either.) But I did love one thing Jonathan Swift wrote: A Modest Proposal, his satirical take on what to do about the “Irish Problem” of too many people and too little food. Trouble was too many didn’t ‘get’ Swift. They thought he was serious about offering up the idea that eating Irish babies would solve both problems at the same time. That leads us, in an admittedly roundabout way, to the proud State of South Dakota, where five legislators have recently introduced a bill to mandate that every citizen must own a gun, starting in 2012.
