You know and I know that despite the emotional pleas of the past 24 hours nothing whatsoever will be done about America’s gun insanity. If Mitch McConnell was able to rally his Senate caucus against the most modest invigoration of gun laws after 26 grade schoolers were murdered at Sandy Hook, he won’t even have to bother after 21 were slaughtered in Uvalde.

While the originalists on the Supreme Court plunge on ahead to take away a right supported by 70% of the public for 50 years, no conservative or red-district liberal is going utter a peep about serious gun control — beginning with universal background checks, red-flag laws and a ban on assault rifles — supported by 60%-plus of their voting age constituents. And we all know why.

Guns are existential for conservatives struggling to maintain authority through the country’s demographic shift. Republicans simply can not win elections without showing support for each and every relaxation of gun laws that gets traction in paranoid America.

You’d like to focus “existential” attention on the victims of our ceaseless gun slaughter. Not just the 21 murdered in Texas yesterday, or the 10 in Buffalo a couple weeks ago, or all those killed in the over 200 mass shootings … in just the first five months of 2022 … (27 in schools) … or those dying from single-victim, gun-homicides/suicides at the rate of … 110 a day, month in and month out. “Existential” has played out for all those people.

But the key to how this truly astonishing level of carnage is sustained lies in the existential threat to the careers of conservative politicians, most but not all of whom are Republicans, should they raise so much as a sympathetic eyebrow at the thought of any … any … kind of controls on the sale and use of guns and ammo. The hard, let’s make that “obscene”, fact is that guns are so deeply and thoroughly hard-wired into the insecure psyches of a deeply threatened minority of Americans they are the very definition of single-issue voters. They may tell pollsters that “immigration” is their biggest concern, but we all know, “immigration” is code for “more brown/black criminals I need to protect myself from.”

In my experience talking “Second Amendment” with “guns rights” supporters, the unmistakable takeaway is that a life without the potency that comes from gun ownership (and display) would be indistinguishable from castration. So good luck getting those remarkably reliable single issue voters to support restrictions on a fundamental life function.

A Pew Study says this:

“White men are especially likely to be gun owners: About half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women.

“Like the gender gap, the education gap in gun ownership is particularly pronounced among whites. Overall, about three-in-ten adults with a high school diploma or less (31%) and 34% of those with some college education say they own a gun; a quarter of those with a bachelor’s degree or more say the same. Among whites, about four-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less (40%) or with some college (42%) are gun owners, compared with roughly a quarter of white college graduates (26%).”

FWIW the same survey shows three times as many conservatives own guns as liberals. … if you’re assessing “the fear factor.”

In a country not held captive by an electoral college system that sustains minority rule …

Assault rifles would be banned.

Internet gun and ammo sales would be banned.

Red flag laws would be universal, with heavy penalties for any seller who violated them.

Bullets would be taxed at a 400% rate.

A license, showing certified training and insurance would be mandatory for every gun owned by anyone anywhere. The market would determine premium prices.

Manufacturers of firearms could be sued, just like manufacturers of death-and-injury causing cars, microwaves and fast food.

But we don’t live in same galaxy as that imagined country. Instead we have the latest mass murder — of school children — in a state where the Republican Governor (Greg Abbott) — who, along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is scheduled to speak to an NRA convention in Houston this coming week. A state where Abbott and his mostly (but not all) Republican legislature recently relaxed gun laws to the point customers aren’t required to even take training before toting a gun to church.

And a country where instead of acting with conscience conservative politicians routinely release the same anodyne responses to the most vile tragedies.

When you hear the phrase “race to the bottom” that kind of overt pandering to paranoia and cynical contempt for public safety is what they’re talking about.