I am a mess today because I underestimated how much VT trauma the Vegas shootings would bring up for me, so please be kind to me in what is likely to be an intemperate post.

Since the NRA and little boy culture in the United States have made owning a gun into a subculture, and you have to be entitled to be able to consume semi-automatic weapons because it’s so cool, they go BANG BANG BANG and who cares if other people die because of your self-indulgence so that we can’t make getting these idiotic weapons hard as hell, let’s just make sure whoever buys anything more powerful than a revolver or a rifle has to buy lifetime liability insurance at point of sale in order to cover the deaths they cause.

Including guns purchased at gun shows.

So every time our excruciatingly stupid public policy around guns causes another set of mass deaths, idiot people cite cars. Well, Uh, cars cause deaths so let’s ban them, huhhhhhhh huhhhhhhh huhhhhhh? Sure, I’ll accept the analogy, but let’s complete it: we know full well cars are dangerous and it’s illegal to operate one without liability insurance.

The same needs to be true of guns, since we’re not banning assault because the NRA.

We’ve got people lining up to sue the *hotel that the Vegas shooter shot from* because that super well-compensated hotel staff whose entire job involves kissing consumers’ butts didn’t use their x-ray eyes to know that a guy with a lot of luggage was carrying guns and demand he open his bags. Instead,we should have people lined up to sue the company who made the AR-15 with such a crappy design that you can modify it so readily to shoot even faster.

Hey, you don’t like the catalytic converter in your car? Go modify it. Don’t like the air bag? Go disable it. Don’t like your advanced braking system? Go modify it?

You don’t know how to do that? (The one is much easier than the others.) That’s right. BECAUSE INSURANCE COMPANIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATORS DON’T WANT YOU TO. If we had insurance companies on the hook for guns rather than FREAKING HOTELS, anything like the AR-15 would be designed up the wazoo to keep idiots from doing idiot things that were going to cost the insurance company money, and you’d have to be an experienced machinist and welder to modify it rather than just some numbnut with an internet kit. Oh, and no, there would be no internet kit because whoever was out selling those would get sued, too, probably by the original gun maker because there is no way that any insurance company would insure you on a gun that any Johnny Putz could hack open and do whatever he wanted to with it.

With liability insurance for guns, you get some insurance companies on the hook for paying for this carnage, long after the original shooter leaves his mortal coil and we’d have another powerful industrial lobby in legislation instead of just the NRA, with the opposite interests as the NRA.

Yes, this is what American politics has come to. I don’t like it. But I can work with it.

Oh, oh, you say that you can’t afford insurance with your very expensive gun? Well, according to the same party that is devoted to protecting your gun rights, poor people don’t deserve health care so I assume that they also don’t deserve to have guns if they haven’t saved prudentially for a gun, or had the American Consumer God bless with them money blessings because they are so deserving and special. Go get a third job if you want a semiautomatic and the liability insurance it requires. That’s what a right-living American would do.