Trump, naturally, chose the Go All-in Option on the guns question at the NRA festivities yesterday. Why not after all? Clearly the proliferation of automatic weapons is being nothing but beneficial.

Former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), among other speakers, broadly rejected proposals for new restrictions [on guns] and called instead for more school security or mental health screenings, while issuing dark warnings of alleged Democratic plots to take weapons.

“We all know they want total gun confiscation, know that this would be a first step,” Trump told the crowd in an auditorium about 300 miles from the site of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex. “Once they get the first step, they’ll take the second step, the third, the fourth, and then you’ll have a whole different look at the Second Amendment.”

You’d have a country more like Sweden than El Salvador in the matter of slaughter by gun. That would be bad why exactly? The guys who wrote the 2d Tweak didn’t have automatic weapons to deal with, nor movies and tv and games full of gun violence, nor a long string of mass shootings by angry men. Tweak Two was about local militias, not an assault rifle in every pot.

The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools, and unlocked doors.

It’s fair enough to say that guns don’t carry out massacres by themselves, but it’s also fair, and urgent, to repeat as loudly as possible that making it horrifyingly easy to buy and carry and use an AR-15 does not help. If there’s a disturbed guy roaming your neighborhood at night shouting threats and scattering used needles all over the sidewalks, as there is where I live, the first thing you do is NOT leave a few AR-15s out for him to use. Deal with bullying by all means, deal with opioid abuse, deal with lack of mental health services – but also stop marketing AR-15s as if they were tennis rackets or six-packs of beer.