For a while now, the boogieman anti-gunners have been pushing to restrict are so-called assault weapons. They don't like the way they look, the fact that they appear to be military weapons, and there is the more legitimate fact that many mass killers have also used them. They want them banned. So banned, in fact, that no one can get them, at least not without NFA paperwork.

In fairness, handguns are used in the vast majority of so-called gun crimes and so-called gun violence incidents, but the anti-gunners have largely refocused, in part because handguns are the go-to weapon for people looking to defend themselves.

Yet an op-ed out of Texas, of all places, makes it clear that handguns aren't really off the agenda.

Over 47,000 people died from firearms in 2023, which is comparable to the total American deaths in Vietnam.

Nearly 60 percent of current firearm deaths are suicides. Firearms represent the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.

Rarely do we hear a call for thoughts and prayers or useful solutions to this preventable slaughter of our population.

Why are these tragedies not addressed? One reason is a 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia et al. v. Heller.

Of course, Heller reversed the District of Columbia's handgun ban, finding that not just is the Second Amendment an individual right, but that governments cannot ban firearms "in common use" for lawful purposes like self-defense, which is precisely what handguns are.

The author claims that this upset 200 years of precedence, but fails to mention any specific cases that somehow made it clear that banning entire categories of firearms was acceptable over those 200 years. That's probably because there's literally none. The Miller case is the closest, where the Supreme Court argued that a sawed-off shotgun had no militia use, and thus was bannable, but handguns most clearly would have such a use. So I fail to see where this precedence is.

Then he makes the whole militia argument that I debunked on Wednesday.