Now someone at Salon — a sixth generation grandson of Thomas Jefferson — is falling on his fainting couch after learning that some Americans like to shoot at long distances. The horror…the horror….

Maybe he’s never heard of PRS. In any case, it’s clearly time to do away with these “military-grade killing machines.”

Take a minute and look at all the military-speak gun-culture nomenclature babble they slap down: “match-grade” and “muzzle brake” and “infinitely adjustable folding stock” and all the rest of that crap. That’s the way they market guns like the “Scorpion,” (sic) and you know what it is? It’s insane.

OK, their use of “insane” is a kind of gun-lover-hipster-speak, and the Scorpio isn’t a semiautomatic assault rifle like the ones used to kill 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook, or the the 50 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, or the 17 students and faculty killed in Parkland, Florida, or the 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas.

But it’s the same style of weapon, with the same style aluminum stock and ventilated “rails” alongside its barrel, and it’s got capabilities far in excess of what would be necessary for any sort of legitimate civilian usage. “Loaded up with the faster 230-grain Berger round, I got hits on a 3-by-3-inch steel target at 2,000 yards,” the reviewer boasted. That is 1.13 miles, folks. This guy hit a target about the size of your forehead from over a mile away.

Who the hell needs to hit something, anything, from over a mile away? I’ll tell you who: an Army or Marine sniper, that’s who. They’re selling military-grade rifles to the general public. That’s what this sniper rifle is, and that’s what all the various iterations of the AR-15 style assault rifles are. Military-grade killing machines.

All of them are for sale on the open market here in the United States of America. You can go down to your local gun store and buy one tomorrow. That means you’ll be able to set the damn Scorpion (sic) up on its bi-pod and hit a so-called “soft target” so far away you need a goddamn telescope to see it.