What you can do with your so-called gun rights. Not to mention the constitutional amendment it rode in on.

I’ve had it. From the Texas Tower sniper back in the 1960s (16 dead, 32 wounded) to the most recent Charleston church incident (9 dead, I’m not sure how many wounded) casual mass murders by some nut, or pathological hater who had no trouble getting his hands on a gun has become as American as the Fourth of July. Well, actually a lot more so. The Fourth of July only happens once a year.

And every time somebody tries to do something about the mass shootings — for example, gun licensing, background checks to eliminate criminals and mental cases, limits on magazine sizes, — the gun lobby, and all the people who suckle and snarf and drool at its toxic teat, go into meltdown mode. Because it’s all about Freedom. It’s all about Our Way of Life. It’s all about Defenses Against Tyranny. It’s all about Crazed Agitators Grabbing Our Guns. And so on.

Well, I’ve had it. I’m fed up. I’m disgusted. I’m outraged. So I’m about to say something terribly rude to the gun rights people — the NRA, the so-called sportsmen, the bought- and-paid-for legislators, the alleged purist strict constructionists, the self-defensers, the stand-your-grounders, the corrupt lobbyists who corrupt the lawmakers and manipulate the suckers. And so on.

Screw you. 

No, I take that back. I apologize. I didn’t mean to say that. That was too tame.

What I meant to say was fuck you. And fuck the Second Amendment. I’m tired of seeing apologists and lawmakers, even liberal ones, twist themselves intro knots that a Boy Scout couldn’t untie in order to kowtow to you. You know the kind of sniveling crap I’m talking about.

 “Yes, I’m 100 percent for gun rights, except I’d want to make sure the buyer has never spent idle days and nights counting his toenails clippings in the looney bin.” 

“Yes, I want to take guns away from criminals. Not sportsmen. Just criminals. I’m a hunter too.”

“I just want to keep guns out of the hands of felons. Well, out of the hands of convicted felons. Well, only out of the hands of convicted felons who’ve already killed somebody. Well…”

Well screw that. You take these baby steps and the NRA and the gun nuts foam at the mouth, and saliva drips from their jaws while they quote a literally demented actor who babbled about taking a gun from his cold dead hands. 

Next, the lobbyists threaten spineless lawmakers. The lawmakers back off. Another week or so goes by. And then another two, or five, or nine, or twenty innocent people get mowed down again, like weeds in front of a lawn tractor, by yet another enraged boyfriend, or blood lusting hater, or paranoid schizophrenic with an easy-to-get gun.

It’s time to stop that the only way that most assuredly will work. It’s a method based on the simple principle that if you don’t have access to a gun, you can't kill anybody with it.

So it’s time we gave the gun nuts something they could really foam at the mouth about. Let’s make their worst paranoid nightmares come true. Let’s actually  grab their guns.  Grab them and take them away forever. Let’s do it by building, however long it takes, a movement to repeal the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment made sense when most armies had precious few weapons more powerful than a blunderbuss or a front-loading single ball rifle. Yeah, sometimes they also had a few brass cannon, if they could truck those extremely heavy objects by horse drawn vehicle through the roadless woods  that made up most of what is now the United States of America. Most of the time they just made do with lead shot and powder horns. So if  anybody invaded us, the scales were balanced. A militia of soldier-farmers hiding behind trees, could easily poke the invaders’ pretty red coats full of ugly black holes. The Second Amendment made sense then.

The Second Amendment also made sense out on the Great Plains, when you couldn’t call the cops because there was no such thing as a cop, or a telephone, or a cell phone, or a radio car — and by the time your nearest neighbors from two miles over the hill found you bleeding on the dirt floor of your cabin, the victim of a wayfaring psychopath or a pissed off tribe of Native Americans who didn’t like trespassers like you on their land, it would have been too late to defend yourself.

But now it makes no sense. You’re afraid of tyranny? You’re going to hold off invading tyrants, or a suddenly run amok United States Government with your AR-15? Or your Glock? Gimme a break. 

They’ll roll over you with a tank. They’ll bomb you from a drone. They’ll blow you apart with a howitzer before you can see the whites of  their eyes —  or the bellies of their airplanes. You’re helpless against invading armies, whether they’re armies of local revolutionaries, or armies of an invading nation, or armies of a self-declared tribe of rapists and robbers under the control of a mad warlord. That’s why we have police departments. And sheriffs departments. And the National Guard. And the United States Army.

If defense had to be conducted by individuals with guns today, the United States of America would turn into another Syria before you could shout “Second Amendment” from your outhouse. There’d be roaming bands of armed private militias mowing down anybody they didn’t like. Not to mention cutting off heads and disemboweling babies. There’d be chaos, and anarchy, and disruption, and whole towns turned to rubble.

Fortunately, we’ve got one of the biggest armed protective establishments in the history of the world. And we need that in part because you’ve still got your weapons and therefore you're a public menace that has to be kept under control.

All those pistols and rifles are good for only one purpose. And that purpose is to kill  something or more likely, somebody. Moreover we have to spend a huge part of the national treasure trying to keep you from doing that. And yet, every week, or two, or three, somebody slips through the net and does it again anyway.

So go shove it. If you have a deep, emotional need for a gun or a rifle, it’s because at some level you have a deep, emotional need to kill something or somebody. Which means you’re a psychopath. You’re not fit for civilized society. You need to be locked in a concrete hole behind barbed wire and left there to rot.

The people need to take your gun away from you before you kill some innocent person with it. Or even somebody’s dog. If you still feel an abiding need to kill, take a fly swatter and go to a garbage dump and swat flies. Or pull their wings off, if it takes that to make you feel virile and powerful. Tell you what. You can even eat them.

It’s time to  grab guns. It’s time to grow a movement to repeal the Second Amendment.. Like the Divine Right of Kings, the Second Amendment is a relic of an era that went away and will never come back. Good riddance to the era. And now, let’s start saying good riddance to the guns left over from it.