Ban Guns. Amend the Constitution.

Charlton Heston said we can pry his gun out of his “cold, dead hands.” He’s been dead nine years. It’s time to ban guns and amend the Constitution so that the Second Amendment can return to its original function. No more bullshit, it’s not nearly as complicated as our leaders — especially our Democratic leaders — have made it out to seem.

I’m not at all sympathetic to the knee jerk pessimism of liberal pundits who claim that nothing can be done about gun control because the GOP-NRA coalition is simply too strong. Our supposed leaders in the Democratic Party are again hemming and hawing about how their failure to secure our mandate is the proximate cause of American mass murder by gun. The subtext is: we failed you because you failed us first.

Allow me to explain.

In the hours following the Las Vegas Massacre, Hillary Clinton tweeted out a complete non sequitur:

This is Incremental Liberalism at its worst. Incremental Liberalism is the political strategy wherein the Democrats promise to fight ever smaller, ever more inconsequential political battles in the belief that progress is made through horse trading, backroom parliamentary tactics, and above all compromise in the center between left and right. Again in her own words:

I think we operate better when we’re kind of between center right and center left, because that’s where, at least up until recently, most American were.

Incremental Liberalism is inherently beneficial to centrist leaders like Clinton because the entire game is about dangling real reforms in front of their constituents while always insisting they’re out of reach until their second term, and beyond that, a first term for a chosen Democratic successor. Failure is built into the system, in the belief that there is only one way to achieve our goal, which is to empower them to make ever shittier deals on our behalf.

Regarding the silencer non sequitur, Clinton was making a reference to a bid by the GOP-NRA, initiated in January of this year, to allow the legal purchase of gun suppressors on the basis that they are necessary for hearing protection. The bill was called, laughably, the Hearing Protection Act.

Clinton raised the Hearing Protection Act to highlight the heroic efforts of Democrats to fight back GOP-NRA initiatives, a tactic consistent with Incremental Liberalism. We are told to applaud their effort to fight for the hypothetical gap between the actual numbers of 59 dead/489 wounded, and what could have been achieved under the Hearing Protection Act. That is the increment Clinton wants us to know the Democrats are fighting for. That is the increment she points to as the result of our failure to elect Democrats.

What we really need could not be more obvious: a Constitutional Amendment that repeals or revises the 2nd Amendment so that either Congress or the states can regulate or eliminate private gun ownership. We know this works because other countries like Australia and Scotland have had similar problems with mass shootings, and solved them through comprehensive gun bans.

Let’s not get into the Incremental Liberalist agenda of eliminating bumper stocks, high capacity magazines, and silencers. Let’s not even pretend like banning the AR-15 is sufficient — a bunch of handguns and shotguns is more than enough for a newsworthy ‘Murican suicide slaughter.

We need to amend the Constitution.

Oh but it can’t be done! say our sober leaders. Impossible! say the Democrats. What is possible of course is for the Democrats to solidify their moral authority in crying tears of pain and frustration while avoiding the obvious solution.

Don’t take my word for it —ask former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger, or former Justice John Paul Stevens. Both conservative justices have clearly stated on the record that the Second Amendment has been twisted by the GOP-NRA into something unrecognizable from the Founders’ original intention. Stevens has gone so far as to tell us exactly what a revised Second Amendment should like like, virtually begging Americans to begin the Amendment process:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

And there it is. The very Court which the Democrats so often blame as the ultimate, unmovable obstacle to real reform, itself telling us exactly what the magic words are if we just had the cojones to say them.

Warren Burger has been on the record that the GOP-NRA committed a massive fraud — fraud — against the American people in twisting the Second Amendment into the enshrinement of personal firearms as a cultural right. It is no such thing.

It’s time for us to stop playing Incremental Liberalism, stop blaming the GOP-NRA for doing what we already know it will do and continue to do, stop blaming the Supreme Court when it’s written a checklist for us on how to do it, and start heaping real demands onto our Democratic leaders who have promised us again, and again, and again that they care, that they really care.

Ban guns. Amend the Constitution.