Back before the 1970s, it was routine to teach teen-age American boys some marksmanship and safe gun handling with turnbolt .22s on such a range. (I shot on such a range as recently as 1965 … in Massachusetts.)

Today, of course, dare to propose reintroducing such training and untold legions of vegetarian mommies, busy teaching their boys that wearing dresses and using the girls' room and even getting hormone shots so they can grow breasts are all perfectly normal, would doubtless shriek in outrage at anyone "daring to put a gun in my innocent son's hands."

But if we needed further evidence of what we lost when we stopped teaching young people at least the rudiments of safe gun handling, we got a grim reminder in December when a San Francisco jury found five-times deported and seven-time convicted illegal alien felon Jose Garcia Zarate (also known as Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez) not guilty of homicide—of anything beyond discharging a firearm inside the city limits—in the 2015 shooting death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle.

The Sig-Sauer pistol in question had been stolen from the car of a BLM ranger in that city a few days before Lopez-Sanchez claims to have "found" it, wrapped in a T-shirt, lying in a heavily touristed area on San Francisco's Pier 14 on July 1, 2015.