To do that, we need to insist on some crucial distinctions.

First, we must stop confusing paid agents speaking for legal fictions with legitimate participants in First Amendment-protected debate. It's time we found courage to limit "speech" fabricated by hired guns, because it is nothing more than a form of marketing.

Indeed, this variety of paid "speech" is sometimes a form of violence against society itself. Violent storytelling has been part of every society since Homer's and the Bible's. But, as the writer Philip Green notes, it's too often now presented as an "aestheticised -- fetishised... source of visceral pleasure" that subordinates "all other content to the fascination with sumptuous violence."

These spectacles aren't calls for a Hobbesian war of all against all by some insurgent movement that, however dangerous, would have First Amendment protection. They're driven primarily by institutions that we as sovereign citizens created to serve our purposes. Our legislatures create the authority of corporate officials; we can stop them from using funds we placed under their control to destroy society's underpinnings.

Second, we need to re-energize the distinction between Constitutionally-protected free political speech and the legally permissible regulation of economic activity. The Supreme Court still recognizes a pale shadow of this difference, but in the Citizens United ruling and elsewhere it has come dangerously close to returning to the Gilded Age Lochner doctrine, which protected illegitimate economic power against the will of the people. The laissez-faire ideology of recent First Amendment jurisprudence mistakes economic regulation for censorship.

But cheating in markets destroys them as surely as cheating destroys sports. To keep boxing viable, we ban lead weights in gloves. Similarly, we've agreed that cigarette companies' association of smoking with the Marlboro man's manliness or Lauren Bacall's sexiness was cheating, not free speech. Today's marketing of guns repeats the same market-distorting errors, taking advantage of human nature to harm individuals, not protect them.

Violent-game producers assure gun manufacturers that repetitive advertising works. Then they piously tell courts and Congress that people's choices aren't influenced by repetitive absorption into trigger-pulling mayhem. Yet guns are flying off the shelves because aggressively marketed fantasies of death and social dissolution are displacing the cultivation of trust.

To keep markets honest, we can limit corporations from using profits to "buy" rule changes from legislators. We should do so by disallowing "business expense" deductions for corporate expenditures to influence public regulation of business or to influence public debate itself.

Video games' depictions of name-branded guns should be identified as paid ads and games should -- if the science warrants -- bear mental health warnings. And, like cigarettes and alcohol, guns themselves should be labeled with truthful disclosures of the actual number of people who commit suicide by their own guns, or have their guns turned against them in crime (as Adam Lanza's mother did), or have their guns stolen and used by criminals -- compared the trivial number who successfully fend off armed criminals.