Instead, the king attempts to ban all sewing needles from his kingdom. Brilliant. We all know how that worked out.

Yet today’s politicians continue attempting to solve their problems — an unwillingness or inability to identify, treat, or lock up dangerous lunatics; a generation of spoiled, jobless, quasi-literate youth who amuse themselves playing endless blow-off-their-heads video games in dark basements — by attempting to ban various sorts of firearms, a 500-year-old technology now so well developed that cheap automatic rifles are widely stamped out in Third World countries in factories originally designed to produce typewriters and license plates.

They might as well try to ban people from using telescopes to look at the planets.