It’s always the same story. The San Bernardino murderers were wielding assault rifles, with which they were able to fire an estimated 65-75 bullets in rapid succession. Assault weapons, which seem to be the armament of choice for mass shootings, used to be illegal under a law that expired in 2004. If the law had stayed on the books, how many victims would have survived in San Bernardino, or at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.? Given the fact that semiautomatic weapons are totally inappropriate for either hunting or home defense, some of us would love to trade them for the possibility of reduced casualties next time somebody decides to go on a rampage.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is an excellent example of the politicians who totally disagree. Last time an assault weapons ban came up, he argued that Americans should not be forced to rely on regular slowpoke rifles “in an environment where the law and order has broken down, whether it’s a hurricane, national disaster, earthquake, terrorist attack, cyberattack where the power goes down and the dam’s broken and chemicals have been released into the air and law enforcement is really not able to respond and people take advantage of that lawless environment.”

Graham is currently a candidate for president and he is actually not any crazier on this subject than most of the other Republican contenders. Although possibly a little more gloomy.

The National Rifle Association got to the power perch it holds today by being passionately irrational and intransigent, and politicians follow their lead. Gun control supporters know their voters generally want reasonable controls, not a universal ban on bullets, so they try to show how evenhanded they are on the matter. (“I am not a hunter. But I have gone hunting,” said Hillary Clinton in 2008, reminiscing about the days when her dad taught her how to shoot at Lake Winola outside of Scranton, Pa.) But the opponents try for insane intensity. When the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a very modest bill that raised penalties on “straw purchasers” — people who buy guns in order to give them to someone barred from making the purchase — Senator Cornyn expressed concern that it could “make it a serious felony for an American Legion employee to negligently transfer a rifle or firearm to a veteran who, unknown to the transferor, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

People, how many of you are worried about the negligent transferor? But the argument obviously worked, since the bill — which was aimed at purchasers who get guns for convicted felons — never even came up for a vote.