I’m always annoyed when some lefty gun-banner throws out this bon mot: “Well, what are the limits, then?  Should people be able to buy rocket launchers?  Nuclear missiles?”

Just because I like to see their heads spin, I say “Certainly.”  I never bother to explain it to them because they are incapable of understanding.  But you?  You’re different.  I can tell.

Ralph (commenter at TTAG) gets it.

Basically, the Second Amendment was intended for two things – repelling an invading army over land, and overthrowing tyranny.  So if you look at it in the spirit in which it was written, at the very least it covers personal arms and crew-served weapons.  So yes, the Second Amendment would cover a howitzer.

The nuke issue gets tricky, but not for long.  See, nukes are VERY expensive.  And they aren’t safe to be around, so on a private property rights basis most people won’t be able to keep them in their residence.  And they’re useless without some kind of delivery system.

So we’re talking a couple BILLION dollars to have one nuke with the ability to use it (excepting suicide bombers, but hey, how likely is that given how big a nuke is?).  So there’s maybe a dozen people in the world who could afford it.  And they all have a vested interest in the world not getting nuked.  No, the real threat of nukes is from nations like Iran and North Korea with nothing to lose.

So I think I can say with 100% confidence that there ought not be any limits on the second amendment.  Anything our infantry can carry and use should be on the shelves at the local gun shop.

Ok, so you’ve internalized the horror of the last post.

Good.  What’s to be done if prevention is out of the question? I’m glad you asked.  Mitigation.

You may not be able to save everyone.  But you can come close.  It took 20 minutes for the police to get to Sandy Hook Elementary School.  I blame physics.  So, that makes the adults already on site the first responders.  It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine what that means.

So, that aside, let’s look at the kinds of people that are engaging in these acts of mass murder and self-destruction.  Mostly, they’re losers.  People who have concluded that their life sucks, so they’re gonna go out with a bang, make a statement, and be on the tee vee so they’ll be Internet Famous when they get to hell.

All of these mass murders have something else  in common besides the basement-dwelling loser status of the perpetrators.  They all happened in so-called Gun Free Zones.

I’m pretty confident that if we get rid of “Gun Free Zones” that these atrocities would simply cease because the losers wouldn’t get the infamy they crave.

They’d just get a bullet in the brain.