In the wake of the Orlando Massacre, the only sure bet you can make is that more guns will be sold, fattening the coffers of gun manufacturers. Meaningful gun-control legislation?  Fuggetaboutit. Not while the NRA is still breathing and a sizable enough slice of America thinks the Federal Government will round up all 300 million-plus guns in America and melt them down, turning them into a giant Statue of Anti-Liberty (Barack Obama) which will reside next to the lady herself in New York Harbor. Less than seven months left in office for Obama’s jack-booted thugs to grab the guns, making it easier for his successor, Donald Trump, to round up the disarmed, then-compliant 11 million-plus illegals for their homeward boundiness (new word!). You might actually think there’s a conspiracy here…. that it’s all one, big, evil plan to… who knows?  I never detect an endgame reason why this kind of stuff will happen and who ultimately benefits. I simply hear it somewhere, like Trump hears things.  It’s just in the case of guns, no one person has ever done more to stimulate sales by his very existence than President Obama. He’s always been the Scary Black Guy Who’ll Erase The Second Amendment With His Pen. I’d give anything to hear what the executives of the gun manufacturers, thriving like never before, really say about their love for chaos, political unrest, mass shootings, and American Paranoia. Gunmaker Smith & Wesson isn’t ready to admit that the Orlando shooting is huge for sales

Why anyone would want to be president is beyond me.  It’s way more dangerous than being a cop or a coal miner or a soldier.

Assassination attempts and plots on Presidents of the United States have been numerous: more than 20 attempts to kill sitting and former presidents, as well as the Presidents-elect, are known. Four sitting presidents have been killed, all of them by gunshot: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President), James A. Garfield (the 20th President), William McKinley (the 25th President) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th President). Two presidents were injured in attempted assassinations, also by gunshot: Theodore Roosevelt (the 26th President) and Ronald Reagan (the 40th President). With the exception of Lyndon Johnson, every president’s life since John F. Kennedy has been threatened with assassination.

Being in Congress is statistically less dangerous than being president, although Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in Tucson in 2011.  Before that, in reverse order were Larry McDonald of Georgia, who died in 1983 on the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 which was shot down over the Sea of Japan— California’s Leo Ryan in 1978, who was on an official visit to Guyana to investigate the activities of the Peoples Temple group led by Jim Jones. Ryan was shot multiple times while boarding an airplane leaving Jonestown— then back to June of 1968 and the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after giving a speech following his California primary win; he died about 25 hours later.

It took RFK’s murder to give Lyndon Johnson the clout to get the relatively mild Gun Control Act of 1968 passed.  It didn’t do much, but it was something, and did restrict the kind of mail-order sales that Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Cruz’s father used to obtain the rifle used kill John F. Kennedy five years earlier.  All these years later and I’m not sure that anything passed dealing with mail order hasn’t been totally made irrelevant by internet sales of guns, no matter what restrictions apply.  A good history of that 1968 moment of legislation is right here … how it laid the groundwork for the repeat-cycle of shooting/vigil/back and forth on guns/mental illness/Second Amendment/ NRA/blame the shooter only/merry-go-round we can’t escape.

More recently, it’s always noted as a main talking point by gun fans that almost without exception, mass shootings in theaters, schools, churches and other public gathering places are “gun-free zones.”  It then follows that had people been armed like the shooter, the shooter would have been stopped sooner, fewer people would get killed in the shootout, and just the knowledge that others were likely similarly armed would have probably discouraged the shooter/terrorist in the first place.  It’s the Good Guys With Guns Make Us Safer Theory, which law enforcement thinks is stupid, but that doesn’t stop the mythology.  Orlando massacre lays to rest NRA’s ‘good man with gun’ defense

Accepting the possibility of a grain of truth in the proposition…putting aside counter-arguments that even trained-officers are barely able to hit the target in mass mayhem, even if they positively identify the target…. we must face the real problem:

Gun Ownership Inequality: Too Many Guns In Too Few Hands; Too Many Hands With No Guns

If they’re selling way more guns than ever before…. and I mean way more guns as we saw earlier… and the percentage of households with guns keeps dropping at the same time…. that can only mean that the excess supply is mostly going to the same or decreasing percentage of the overall population.  The gun rich are getting richer.  If that chart above were a stock, the 40-year trend would be unmistakable: sell.  Get out. That’s an unbreakable, unmistakable downtrend that even with increased sales overall, there is a four-decade decline in what percentage of people actually own guns.  So, in any mass shooting situation, you’re statistically less likely to be lucky enough to be near a good guy with a gun.  It does you no good that the one-third of people who own guns have 12 of them at home and you don’t have even one.  It’s not fair.  It’s time for government redistribution of guns.  Not confiscation.  Just redistribution for everyone’s safety.  It’s a crisis! Eight percent of those gun owners (or two percent of American adults) can claim an arsenal of 10 or more firearms, while 25 percent own five or more guns.

Over 6 Million Americans Own 10 or More Guns

An argument against forced taxation is just that: It’s taxation with the force of government behind it.  Most of us accept that as one of the prices we pay for living in the United States, and it truly is the redistribution of wealth.  The argument always gets down to who and what should be the recipients of the redistribution.  The army, the parks, the retired, the building of highways and airports… the list is endless. I don’t see for a second the problem with sharing the gun wealth, either.  The Second Amendment doesn’t read “The right of some of the people to not keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  Let’s get busy here.  Infringement for the good of the people!

The Redistribution of Guns Act of 2017.  I know…. not gonna happen.  I don’t even think the actual assassination of one of the two remaining candidates or their family members would change minds.  The Economist wrote this after Charleston in 2015:

Those who live in America, or visit it, might do best to regard them (mass killings) the way one regards air pollution in China: an endemic local health hazard which, for deep-rooted cultural, social, economic and political reasons, the country is incapable of addressing. This may, however, be a bit unfair. China seems to be making progress on pollution….

To which the all-guns-no-controls-all-the-time crowd will gleefully point out: “yea, British Brexit Boys, your own tight gun control country just saw one of its Parliament members shot to death. Don’t lecture us!”