We must get everyone in America a yacht to protect them from gun violence!

Well, I am the fool. The National Rifle Association’s Wayne Lapierre testified this week during his organization’s bankruptcy hearing that there was a good reason he spent so much time on a friend’s 108-foot yacht, called Illusions.

Illusions was “the one place that I hope I could feel safe,” he said, “where I remember get- ting there going, ‘Thank God I’m safe, nobody can get me here.’” And you know what? I believe him. The only detail of this story that is frustrating is the thought that he knew a solution that would guarantee absolute safety, and he was keeping it so quiet.

Here he was sitting on the holy grail that the United States has been searching for for so long — and he said nothing! He should have been shouting this “security retreat” from the rooftops. In the United States, we have reached a point of numbness and despair where gun violence gets treated as something akin to bad weather, a grim condition of living in this country, to be planned around but never prevented. Yet all this time, Wayne Lapierre had the antidote! Yachts!

I am not mad that Wayne Lapierre was frittering money away and relaxing aboard a watercraft that contained not one but TWO wave runners and a “hydraulic swim platform.” No. I’m just relieved we finally know how to keep millions of Americans safe from gun violence. The only thing that remains now is to implement this solution at scale. Doubtless this will count as infrastructure now that we know how essential it is to keeping Americans safe and healthy, and we can tuck it into the American Jobs Act somehow.

We must band together as a nation and demand that all our schools be equipped with yachts. All places of work must have a big yacht (108 feet minimum, perhaps even bigger) with a cook and a hydraulic swim platform. I am not sure how putting supermarkets on yachts will work, but we had better try it. Not until everyone in this country is safe aboard their yacht can we breathe easily again.

Although maybe it isn’t just yachts. Maybe it’s spending money, in general. Wayne Lapierre additionally used the NRA to pay for a mosquito treatment at his home, which apparently was also a security measure. The organization spent $65,000 on Christmas gifts from him. It seems clear that what gun violence responds to well is money.

Again, I’m not upset. I’m just relieved that there exists a solution. Praise be! All these years of anguishing over the question of how we were going to keep schoolchildren safe from gun violence, how we were going to keep people in grocery stores and offices and places of work and buildings and concerts and — America, generally, safe from gun violence, and the answer, all along, was: yachts.

Now that we know we do not need to reduce the number of guns or the ease of access to guns or pass any sort of legislation about guns because we already have the solution, I am sure the NRA will be very relieved. Its leadership can set about equipping every American with a service yacht, for their own protection. With two wave runners, just to make assurance double sure.

It is too bad the NRA is bankrupt now, unrelatedly.

We must band together as a nation and demand that all our schools be equipped with yachts. All places of work must have a big yacht (108 feet minimum, perhaps even bigger) with a cook and a hydraulic swim platform. I am not sure how putting supermarkets on yachts will work, but we had better try it. Not until everyone in this country is safe aboard their yacht can we breathe easily again.