The AR-15 pistol and ammo drum used in the Dayton murders

So here we are again, my friends and fellow citizens, this time in the bloody wake of two mass shootings in a single weekend, each engineered by a solitary white male armed with a rapid-fire, military-style weapon legally manufactured and legally bought. The story is too familiar, too humdrum, to hold our interest for long, so let’s seize the moment, shall we?

Once again, the motive in the case of El Paso was ethnic hatred given wanton permission by soulless, unaccountable web presences and by the President of the United States.

Once again we are obliged to listen to Donald Trump read platitudes from a TelePrompTer with robotic, palpable insincerity, staring into the camera, looking like a truant dragged into the principal’s office. We all know when he really means something, and this is not how he says it.

And once again, across the land there are calls — no, screams; shouts of outrage and disgust — for some reasonable legislative response to the most obvious of the ingredients of this uniquely American poison: not mental illness, not video games, not the general degradation of public morality and private ethics, but rather, simply, the preposterously ready availability of weapons of a mass murder to every Tom, Dick and Harry (did I mention every dick?) with the whim to use them.

Couldn’t we all agree, as adults, as men (for it is mostly men who own them), that there is no defensible reason for any private citizen to own an AR-15 (or an AR-15 style weapon, as we are prissily required to say, lest gun aficionados point out our ignorance), much less a hundred-round ammunition drum to go with it? Target practice? Are you kidding? Self-defense? Against what army? Hunting? Unsporting, and little left of the prey when you’re finished. Civil insurrection? You and what army?

No, the most likely reason for a private citizen to own an AR-15 or its ilk is to indulge a nihilistic pleasure in sheer destruction that most of us outgrow — or find constructive outlets for — by the time we reach puberty. And that is not the sort of pleasure you want to pair with a weapon designed to mete out death as efficiently as possible.

Even if, for a few good men, there is a remotely plausible reason to own such at thing — historical interest, love of intricate machinery, empathy with the military — couldn’t we, as adults, as men, agree that the cost of having them freely available to every fool (or every suicidal depressive, deluded ideologue, or raging misanthrope) with access to WiFi and a credit card is much too high?

This shouldn’t even be debatable, much less debated on constitutional grounds, and yet the Second Amendment is the first, last, and only refuge of the gun rights absolutists who oppose every effort to limit the wanton (“free” is too mild a word) availability of military-style firearms. They have the sense to keep quiet for a few days after events like this, or at most mouth pieties about thoughts and prayers. But soon they will rise, as they always do, and explain to us how the more of us are armed the safer we’ll become (despite the fact that Dayton police took down their target in less than 30 seconds and still couldn’t limit the dead-and-injured toll to single digits), and how it’s not guns but sick people who kill, and how, in any event, gun ownership — any gun, anytime, anywhere — is a Constitutional right, up there with freedom of speech and religion.

To which there are at least two possible responses. One is that gun rights absolutism is based on a relatively recent interpretation of the Second Amendment that was met with derision by Constitutional scholars when first promulgated by an NRA-backed commission, and called by Chief Justice Warren Burger “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word fraud — on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” It was not so very long ago that the NRA was nothing but a sportsman’s organization rather than a right-wing lobbying vehicle, and Richard Nixon could call handguns “an abomination” and be thought no less a conservative for it.