Every time there’s a shooting which makes national news, the pro-gun movement gets religion and offers ‘thoughts and prayers,’ while the anti-gun movement comes up with yet another euphemism which they believe will make some gun owners think that they, the anti-gun people, aren’t against guns.

              In the olden days, which was back when the NRA’s national headquarters was located in downtown D.C. within walking distance of the FBI, nobody had any problem with using the term ‘gun control.’ This was because in those olden days nobody talked about guns.

              The government passed two gun laws during the 1930’s which basically made it a long, drawn-out process if you wanted to buy a machine gun. These laws also required gun dealers to register with the government and keep records on who bought guns. But nobody ever came around to look at those records, so nobody cared about guns.

              This all changed after JFK was shot in 1963. It took five years for the government to pass another gun law, but when they did enact a law in 1968, the legal landscape involving guns fundamentally changed.

              First and foremost, we now had a national police force, the ATF, whose agents went around to every federally licensed gun dealer to make sure they were following the rules. This law also required that every interstate movement of any kind of gun had to go from one licensed dealer to another licensed dealer, which meant that the entire commerce of guns in the United States was now under government control.

              It was during the debate over this 1968 law that the term ‘gun control’ first reared its ugly head. All of a sudden, if you supported the idea that the gun industry needed to be regulated far beyond the regulations imposed on other consumer goods, you supported gun ‘control.’ If you didn’t understand how or why the government needed to treat guns differently than the way they treated the sale of cigarettes or cars, you were against gun ‘control.’

              The pro-gun movement began to demonize ‘gun control’ after 1977, when the NRA became much more focused on direct, political action to promote 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ and shifted from an organization primarily concerned with guns for hunting and sport to guns for self-defense. In that respect, the NRA’s strategy was simply a recognition of the degree to which the organization would have eventually disappeared had it continued to promote a hunting culture which was also on the way out.

              Even though the government passed two gun bills in 1994 (assault weapons ban and Brady), these legislative initiatives did not coincide with any growth of a mass, anti-gun movement, the latter only coming about in 2013 following the massacre at Sandy Hook. The driving force in this respect was a decision by Mike Bloomberg whose personal financial resources matched or succeeded the NRA’s coffers, to develop a national, grass roots, anti-gun movement which in turn led to the appearance of Shannon Watts and her MOMS.

              The moment that anti-gun activity went big-time, however, the leadership of Bloomberg’s effort plus other groups (Brady, Giffords) realized that talking about guns as products which needed to be ‘controlled’ was too toxic a narrative to capture support from anyone on the other side.

              So, the phrase ‘gun control’ disappeared and was replaced by ‘gun violence prevention’ (GVP) which has now been replaced by ‘safety’ or ‘responsibility’ as ways to define the proper behavior of gun owners who don’t want to give up their guns.

              How does the anti-gun movement want ‘responsible’ gun owners to behave with their guns? The guns should always be locked up or locked away, the gun owners should spend time being trained, there should be no transfer of any gun to anyone without a background check and nobody should be walking around with a concealed weapon unless this conduct has been approved by the police.

              So, the United States will continue to have a civilian arsenal which will contain as many as 60 million guns that are also issued and used by the military and the police, but we won’t continue to suffer 100,000 – 125,000 intentional gun injuries every year because we will all behave responsibly with our guns.

              And anyone who wants to believe that nonsense should fly out and spend a weekend with the Martians who live at Area 51.  

              Last week it appeared likely that Congress would actually pass a new gun-control law for the first time since 1994. We’ve only had some 2.5 million Americans killed and injured by intentional shootings since the 1994 law was passed, so no big deal. But the real problem if the new law makes it to Joe’s desk is how my friends in Gun-control Nation will deal with the fact that they have been using the lack of new gun laws to raise money and now maybe the well will run dry.

              But not to worry. Thanks to an expected ruling from the Supreme Court on New York’s gun law, my friends in gun-control land will be able to make a big deal out of what is expected to be the Court’s overturning of the licensing procedure for walking around with a gun in New York which has been on the books since 1911 (the infamous Sullivan Law) and will make it more difficult for the other few, remaining states whose process for granting concealed-carry permits copies the New York law.

              As late as the mid-1970’s, there were only a handful of states which allowed residents to carry a concealed weapon, regardless of whether or not people applying for such a license could prove any kind of real need. Now we have gone to the other extreme and most states allow people to walk around with a gun as long as they can pass the background check which is required when they buy that gun.

              At present there are 25 states which have what Gun-nut Nation calls ‘Constitutional carry,’ which means that if you can legally buy a gun, you can also carry it around on your person, no questions asked. Another 18 states require some kind of concealed-carry licensing process but do not allow the cops to decide who can and cannot carry a gun. These states are referred to as ‘shall issue’ states.

              Finally, there are still seven Communist states (I happen to live in one such state) that still give police the final authority to decide whether someone can carry a concealed gun outside the home. These are known as the ‘may issue’ states, of which New York has always been the toughest state of all to convince the cops that you need to stick the ol’ shootin’ iron in your pocket when you leave your abode.

              So yesterday, the Fake News decided to inform its readers exactly what this New York law is all about, and here’s what they said in The Washington Post: “New York’s law requires a gun owner to obtain a license to carry a handgun. To get the license, they must demonstrate to local authorities a specific need for carrying the gun.”

              What the story doesn’t say is that the New York law which covers what a resident needs to do even just to buy and own a gun is almost as restrictive as the law which covers carrying the gun around town. And since I lived in New York City and went through the whole, stupid process that eventually allowed me to own a gun, here’s what the process involves.

              First, you have to go online and register an account with the NYPD.  Then you fill out an online application and upload some forms. Then you upload some more forms. These forms include a birth certificate, some kind of ID, some form which proves where you live, etc.

              You will then receive a message giving you an appointment to come down to the licensing division to be fingerprinted and to pay applicable fees. You must be ready to pay $340 for the license plus another $88.25 for the prints. You also must bring the original copies of all the forms you uploaded to the NYPD.

              Ready?  The cops have six months to decide whether to give you a license to own a gun and keep it in your apartment or home. Not to carry the gun around town. That’s a whole different procedure which is much more complicated and takes more time to complete.

              Now that you finally get your license to own a gun, you still need to apply for a permit to actually buy a gun. This involves sending in a request to the license division listing the type of gun, the caliber, and the manufacturer. After this application is approved, you are sent a purchase order which you then take to the dealer and exchange it when you buy the gun. But you’re still not done because you then have to bring the gun down to the licensing division and have it inspected by a cop to make sure it’s the gun model that was approved for your purchase order.

              Now you are finally ready to keep a gun in your residence. Great.

              Note that New York City does not require that a gun owner take any kind of test to demonstrate either proficiency with the gun or a knowledge of laws relevant to owning a gun. In other words, the NYPD couldn’t care less if you actually have any degree of ability to use a gun, as long as you have paid all the requisite fees to get a license to on a gun.

              Now if you want to explain to me how and why this process does anything to keep guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands, when I can go to a gun show in Vermont or Virginia, walk around, and ask this guy or that guy if the gun he’s carrying is for sale, then bring the gun back to New York City and either keep the gun or sell it to someone else, I’m all ears.

              And this is what Gun-control Nation believes is a law which will be overturned by the SCOTUS and make us all less safe?

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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