Figures it would finally happen after a mass shooting in Texas. By that I mean a debate about gun control which focuses not on control, but on guns.

But before I get to that issue, I’ll take a second and give you a link to the single most bizarre public performance of all time by any President of the United States. Here is how Donald Trump ended his NRA speech after reading off the names of the victims killed at Uvalde. Watch this.

Now back to guns.

You see, in this country we go about protecting ourselves from gun violence by trying to control the behavior of people who, left to their own devices, will walk into a public space with a military weapon and see how many people they can kill with the twenty, or thirty, or forty rounds of ammunition which the gun holds.

In every other country which has a system for controlling guns, you simply can’t buy a gun which lets you walk into a public space and begin blasting away. Live in Canada and want to own an AR-15 with a thirty-round mag? Move to the United States. And Canada has a much more permissive attitude towards gun ownership than say England, or France, or Japan.

We actually began controlling guns with a 1934 law which differentiated between guns that civilians could own versus guns that were too dangerous to be just sitting around in pawn shops and hardware stores waiting to be bought and taken home. But the only guns which this law identified as too dangerous for instant sale were machine guns, the full-auto thingies that Al Capone used to wipe out another Chicago mob.

And this has remained the only way we have ever defined the risk and danger posed by how guns are designed, which is whether they can deliver 600 bullets a minute or less. And if it’s less, if someone can walk into a classroom and kill 20 kids in a minute or so, as long as the shooter has to pull the trigger for every shot, the gun is no more dangerous than a b-b gun.

Want to know why we have all these mass shootings and other advanced countries don’t? Because we are the only country which lets people buy, own and walk around with guns that were designed primarily for the military, in other words, guns whose sole purpose is to be used by soldiers to kill other soldiers.

But hold on, you say. The guns used by the Army fire the way that the guns used by the Capone gang in Chicago were used — they are machine guns, they are full-auto guns.

That’s not true. That’s not true at all, and anyone who tries to promote that nonsense either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or doesn’t know anything about guns (a not unusual combination, by the way.)

The battle rifle that our troopers carry into the field can be set to fire either in semi-auto mode or in a three-shot burst. So, if the trooper decides that he wants to shoot one round every time he pulls the trigger, is he going into battle with a sporting gun? Yea, right.

It figures, by the way, that the speech Trump gave at Houston yesterday, where there were more people outside protesting than inside listening, was written for him by someone who went back and dusted off Jeff Cooper’s Principles of Personal Defense, which starts off with a brief comment on how there are lots of ‘evil’ people out there and you always need to be ready if one of them comes at you.

The only problem with this endless attempt to sell guns by making them out to be a better way to protect yourself than running away is that it’s pretty hard to convince people that the little kids who were killed at the elementary school in Uvalde were ‘evil people.’ Even a devoted fan of false arguments like Donald Trump can’t pull that one off.

But of course, there’s always the time-worn argument about guns which was trotted out the other day by Ted Cruz, which is that for all the grief and suffering caused by gun violence, we simply can’t compromise on our beloved Constitutional principles, in this case the 2nd-Amendment guarantee of gun ‘rights.’

Maybe you don’t own a gun, but you still support the Constitution, right?

Wrong motherf*cker, wrong.

The 2nd Amendment isn’t a ‘right.’ It’s an amendment. And we define every word in the Constitution by passing laws, as in what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong.’ And walking into an elementary school where you then spend an hour in target practice because the local cops and the state police didn’t know what to do isn’t ‘right.’ It’s goddamn wrong. Period. End of that one, okay?

The NRA loves to refer to itself as America’s ‘first civil rights organization.’ Know when the first civil rights law was passed? In 1866, two years after we passed the 13th Amendment which took 4.5 pieces of chattel property and turned them into human beings. So, we had to figure out what this now meant for all these new people, which is what the 13th Amendment did.

Guess what? There’s no reason why we can’t pass a law that will define whether certain types of guns are too dangerous to be bought and sold. Want to give me a definition of ‘dangerous’ which is more exact than how a kid used an assault rifle made by Daniel Defense to kill 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School?

What has kept Gun-nut Nation going in political terms has been one, simple fact, which is that most gun crimes are committed by people who can’t legally own guns, whereas most of the people who do own guns legally happen to live in the South, particularly in Texas. So as long as you can build a nice, electoral foundation by appealing to ‘law-abiding gun owners,’ you’ll keep the gun-control wolf away from the front door.

Which is why I began this column by saying that a mass shooting in Texas is what Gun-control Nation needs to finally get the gun ‘rights’ monkey off their backs.

Here’s a new website which sums it all up: www.bantheseguns.org.

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