Proponents of doing so disregard both the Constitution and the available evidence

These are the times that try our Constitution.

The recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, could almost have been contrived in a laboratory as a means by which to test Americans’ commitment to the Bill of Rights. The killer, a young white-supremacist man who believed stupidly that he was striking a blow against “cultural and ethnic replacement,” was a poster to the website 8chan — a site that, in any other country, would likely have been prosecuted and shut down by now. To carry out his attack, he used an AK-47, a semi-automatic rifle that, in any other country, would …