Don't mess with Condi

Scripps Howard News Service: A defense of gun rights has come from an interesting and, some would say, unlikely source -- pianist, scholar and diplomat Condoleezza Rice.
Interviewed on "Larry King Live," the secretary of state said that the Second Amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," was the equal of the First, the freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
She grew up in the segregated South and said her minister-father and his friends armed themselves to protect the black community against night-riding members of the Klan.
Framers knew
Rice said that the framers of the Constitution understood that "there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Ala., when, in fact, the police weren't going to protect you." She might have added that not only didn't the police protect them, but they attacked them with clubs, dogs and fire hoses.
And she opposes gun registration for a compelling reason. If the local authorities -- segregationist public-safety director Bull Connor and Klan-allied police -- had known which blacks had weapons, they might have confiscated them. She has a point. As President Bush's former adviser on the matter, she knows a thing or two about security.