So the bill to ‘ban’ bump-stocks isn’t a ban at all.  It forbids anyone from manufacturing, importing or selling these things and, oh yes, you also can’t smuggle one in. Which isn’t a ban.  A ban means that nobody can own the product – period.  Which means that current bump-stock owners would have to get rid of them, trash them, disassemble them, ship them to Honduras, whatever. That’s a ban. The Curbelo-Moulton bill isn’t a ban.

             When Australia decided to ban assault rifles after a mass shooting in 1996 that left 35 people dead and 23 wounded, the government not only prohibited the import, manufacture and sale of assault weapons, it also made the ownership of such guns previously purchased to be against the law. Which meant that Australians were going to lose property that had been purchased in a legal way.  That’s expropriation without compensation. And that’s what a ‘ban’ really means. Gone.

To get around this problem, the Australian government added a 2% tax to the national health insurance and used the revenue to compensate assault-rifle owners at a fair market price when they turned in their guns. Now let’s say, for sake of argument, that there are 100,000 bump-stocks floating around, and let’s say every bump-stock owner got $100 bucks for turning it in. That’s 10 million bucks. Hell, we spend more money buying bottled water every week. That’s nothing.

But the reason we won’t ban bump-stocks isn’t because of the chump-change for getting them all turned in; it would set an interesting, and for Gun-nut Nation a very ugly precedent for other gun bans.  And if there’s one thing which unites every member of Gun-nut Nation together in defense of their 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ it’s not that Mike Bloomberg is behind every, nefarious gun-control strategy that has ever been announced, it’s the idea that any restrictions on guns represents a ‘slippery-slope’ which will eventually lead to confiscation of all guns, or worse.

I’m not sure when the NRA began selling the idea that gun ownership was synonymous with ‘freedom,’ but every time any kind of gun-control idea rears its ugly head, the response invariably begins with some muddled nonsense about how guns make us ‘free.’ And if the cost of that ‘freedom’ is eighty or ninety people whose lives end each day because they got shot with a gun, how do you dare place a price-tag on the freedoms that Americans enjoy? After all, if it weren’t for that creep Bloomberg, the good folks in New York City would still enjoy the freedom to buy large-size, full-calorie drinks at sporting events and other public venues, and everyone knows that holding your assault rifle in one hand and a 24-ounce Coke in the other is as American as apple pie, obesity and 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

You think the same government which forks out a measly 10 mil for bump-stocks would even hiccup if it had to lay out $12 billion which is what it would cost to compensate owners for all the assault rifles laying around at $800 apiece?  We’re going to fork over $400 billion to give the three military services a new plane, the F35, which they really don’t need. Spend 3% of that dough to disarm America, then impose martial law, resettle the entire population of Syria and a few other Muslim countries within our borders and ship Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh off to the other side of the moon. I guarantee you this plan exists. You can also meet real, live Martians at Area 51.

The big problem for the NRA is how to figure out how an ‘armed citizen’ could have prevented what happened in Vegas last Sunday night. I’ve got it! Remember how Wayne-o said that every school should have an armed guard after Sandy Hook? Why not insist that every hotel busboy in Vegas be trained to carry and use a gun? I’m sure the NRA Training Division is already working on a new course entitled ‘Basic Gun Handling While Carrying A Tray.’