Amid the hysteria

Making all commercial gun sellers and buyers live by the same rules in no way infringes on anybody’s right to own a firearm or firearms under the Second Amendment.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson tweeted a little demagoguery to the contrary Tuesday, saying President Barack Obama ought to spend more time fighting ISIS and less time attacking Second Amendment rights.

That was a banal Republican talking point, probably sent out in an email blast from GOP headquarters in Washington earlier in the day. And what would you expect, anyway, from a guy who warmed up for governor by signing on as a hired gun for the National Rifle Association in its opposition to tightened gun restrictions?

That was in 2013 after 20 first-graders and second-graders got shot and killed by a gun-freak in Connecticut.

Nobody is coming for your gun unless you mean the one you’re hoping to buy at a gun show or from some unlicensed traveling peddler and thus escape any check into your background. On that prospective gun, the president would have you wait for possession until after you have cleared the same check you cleared on the arsenal you’ve assembled at home by purchasing from licensed gun dealers—and which no one, absolutely no one, is coming to get.

The president is wanting—yes, by his own executive order, because Congress is worthless on the issue— to draw up a regulation to define some license-exempt gun “hobbyists” in the same way as licensed gun dealers for background-check purposes.

A guy with a lot of new guns that he takes around to traveling shows for unlicensed sales for his own profit may indeed be a hobbyist. And it’s a hobby to which he is fully entitled. But he’s also as much a gun dealer as the guy at the gun store. And the guns he sells can be used improperly and hurt people. So you ought to do the same paperwork at the gun show.

This simple uniformity would have no effect on the law-abiding gun purchaser other than to allow him to complain at gun shows about having to “fill out these dad-blamed communist papers for that Muslim up there in the White House for a few more weeks.”

Think of all the rhetorical fun the old boys could have, at least until President Rubio restores inequality and discrimination among gun sellers to revive the ability to get guns without having your background checked.

A federally licensed gun dealer told me via social media last week that he’d heard fellows ask at gun shows if they could buy without a background check the gun they were admiring, and then watched them buy that gun only after being assured that indeed no such inconvenience was applied in that unregulated venue.

And tightening that up is supposed to amount to an infringement on Second Amendment rights?

Background checks are constitutionally sound. Uniformity in them is sure- enough constitutionally sound.

Republicans essentially are saying that the people they don’t want to allow to vote unless they produce paperwork should be allowed to buy a firearm without doing paperwork.

Don’t let ’em vote. They might vote wrong. But let ’em shoot, because they have the right. Don’t you see?

There is one good counterpoint to Obama’s simple proposal. It’s that criminals will get guns anyway. It’s that the mass-shooting perpetrators possessed their guns legally. It’s that there’ll still be trouble in the city tonight, in Chicago and Little Rock and beyond and between. All of that is absolutely true. Public policy is one thing, and ought to be sound and fair. Personal behavior is another, and hard to change.

Yes, alas, there will be murder in the city tonight. But that doesn’t mean we should repeal the public policy that murder is against the law.

If anybody speeds on the highway this morning, we may as well pull up the speed-limit signs, I guess.

Public policy must rise above violators, not consent to them.

One essential point of public policy is to leverage public authority to effect change in bad personal behavior. We need to do what we can to inch our society toward one in which the bad guys have a harder time getting guns and the law-abiding citizens have an easy one assembling their arsenals as their hearts desire and fears demand.

Of greater consequence in the struggle against mass shootings might be Obama’s attempt to do a better job assessing, diagnosing and then identifying in our databases those who are mentally ill.

Don’t try to tell me that denying a mentally ill person a gun amounts to an attack on your gun rights under the Second Amendment.

Because you just called yourself nuts, and I don’t think we’ve determined that yet.

I believe there’s hope for your sanity—indeed for the nation’s— amid all this hysteria that the gun lobby foments.