A conservative communications specialist formerly working in Arkansas named Stefani Buhajla got a little smug and sassy toward Democrats on social media the other day.
She wrote, "It's a hotly contested midterm election year, the left is already down by 20 points in the second inning, and they are running on gun control? Someone over there needs to call a time out for a pitching change."
I was chagrined by these words, and not merely because, in baseball's innings, you don't score "points," but "runs."
You might think, considering my recent obsession with political practicality, that I'd be agreeable to the proposition that Democrats are tactically inept in raising the issue of guns with the midterm election looming and the political temperature unfavorable for assertive liberal policies.
But you'd be wrong. Nothing is more practical than the introduction of the most cursory regulation of these gun-making kits that a criminal can now order online and assemble at home. The regulations would simply be the same as those for assembled guns.
By definition, profound logic cannot be impractical.
These "ghost guns" proliferate with ease and stealth, feeding a subculture by which home-assembled firearms get into the hands of culturally alienated children who get into fusses on social media and take their kit-assembled weapons to the streets to shoot each other and anyone in their bullets' paths.
Talk to Mayor Frank Scott about Little Rock's crime problem. First he'll emphasize that this killing wave is happening everywhere. Immediately after that he'll talk about these ubiquitous stealth guns and that we need to do something about them.
Now comes President Joe Biden to announce a new executive regulation through the Justice Department--not a bill, because he couldn't pass one--to do the simplest things.
The components of these gun kits would have to contain serial numbers, like home appliances and guns coming already put together. Buyers would need to pass the same background checks as those buying pre-assembled guns.
It's so wholly practical that the logic-afflicted conservative editorial page endorsed it the other day.
Alas, the National Rifle Association opposes the regulation, but not with any specific direct objection of substance. It argues only that the real answer is to enforce the law and arrest these people running around out there with these ghost weapons.
After all, untraceable firearms don't kill people. Kids who shouldn't be able to get them kill people, mostly each other.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, on a bit of a statement-issuing roll lately, parroted the NRA position.
The Gun Owners of America, rising in prominence because the NRA is mismanaged and too moderate, opposes the simple notion that the Constitution permits the government to require anything of a free American obtaining a weapon, be it assembled from a box of unmarked parts, a flame thrower, or a nuclearized spud nestled in a potato shooter carried openly through the street.
This Gun Owners outfit describes this simple regulation for serial numbers and common background checks as the most egregiously unlawful thing the government has done since banning "bump stocks" that could turn firearms into machine guns by which a guy could fire thousands of rapid rounds at outdoor concert-goers through a room window of a Las Vegas high-rise hotel.
After all, machine guns don't kill people. Hotel guests exercising their constitutional rights to fire them out of windows kill people. Don't you see?
Alas, I do not.
I try hard and with some success to understand contemporary American conservatives. They're everywhere around here. I know several. They seem normal. Some even seem nice. Have a roadside automotive breakdown in Arkansas and, I'll wager, the first kind soul stopping to help will be a conservative.
But three things about these fine people I simply cannot get.
One is how they could possibly fall for the cons of Donald Trump and surrogate daughter Sarah Sanders.
Two is how they could fail to see the basic horror of condoning insurrection.
Three, and perhaps most frustrating, is why they would oppose rudimentary regulatory steps before buying a gun kit that would not remotely affect their free and legal home arsenals. They merely would impose a mild serial-number mandate on a manufacturer and introduce less paperwork for sellers and themselves than is required to get past the waiting room as a first-time patient at a doctor's office.
I guess it's all about fear of not having sufficient arms when the rampaging criminal gangs come for them, brandishing guns that are homemade, unregistered and untraceable, doing so as known criminals who couldn't pass the background checks the frightful protected them from.
At any rate, the new regulation will be quickly sued and probably stopped by some conservative judge's preliminary injunction, surely in time for summer's crime wave.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.