I’ve yet to hear a single argument in favor of private gun ownership that makes one whisker of sense.

So I’m going to propose a flat-out ban on all private ownership of all guns, and see where it takes us.

Let me start by pointing out that possessing a bong — a marijuana pipe — has for decades been grounds for long jail sentences roughly equivalent to sentences for manslaughter (or longer). You can’t kill anyone with a bong. Well, theoretically you could, I suppose, if you shoved it down their throat and they choked to death on it. It’s one of the more difficult ways I can imagine to kill someone.

So there’s apparently nothing untoward in legal theory or practice with throwing a citizen’s ass in the slammer for decades because they possess something that someone, somewhere, thinks they just might somehow abuse. If we can make bongs an offense punishable by years in prison, we could make owning a Christmas fruitcake a capital offense. We could certainly make guns illegal. We could even make toy guns illegal.

“SECOND AMENDMENT!” the cry goes up. “THAT’S UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”

Well, newsflash, dearhearts: the fourth amendment went quietly down the toilet during the Reagan years. The first amendment is currently hanging by a heavily-interpreted thread, and has been effectively abolished in some parts of the country. No one even knows what the third amendment is about. There’s no particularly good reason to obsess about the second.

But I agree. We ought to do this properly, if only once in our modern history. We should amend the Constitution, perhaps with a clarifying amendment that emphasizes that you have the right to bear arms while actively serving in a “well-ordered militia.” Then, if you go on a school-shooting rampage, your affiliated militia is deemed “not well-ordered,” it gets disbanded, and everyone in it has to turn in their guns. Or we could just rescind the second amendment outright, the same way the eighteenth amendment (Prohibition) was rescinded by the twenty-first (Repeal of Prohibition). Since the second amendment is a relic from the slave-owning days, which ended with the thirteenth amendment, it doesn’t have any real reason to exist any more.

“TYRANNY!” the cry goes up. “WE HAVE TO DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT.”

Bullshit.

It’s bullshit from a practical perspective, in that no rag-tag mob of civilian gun-owners is going to prevail against a real well-ordered militia in the form of the U. S. military machine. You’d have exactly as much chance of winning that war if you used spitballs, which is to say, none at all. Though you’re more likely to live through it if you use spitballs.

But it’s also empty posturing bullshit. Consider that the people who consistently yell the loudest about tyranny almost lost their minds in 2008 when we got a black president. They worked themselves into a creamy froth over the Injustice of Taxation, and Death Panels, and Benghazi, and E-Mails, and all the Intrusive Regulations of the God-Damned Government, and that black man in the white house.

So where was the armed uprising? Come on, guys: you were all squealing like a pig that sat on a cactus over the God-Damned Government. Where was the armed uprising? What does it take to get you off your beer-soaked asses and out from in front of the television?

Oh yeah — there was that Bundy thing up in Oregon. And that other Bundy thing down in Nevada. And the Gabby Giffords thing. And a whole lot of dead schoolchildren. It certainly makes me proud to be a self-reliant, freedom-loving American.

These days, as we edge toward actual fascism, we hear these Rebels Against Tyranny post Internet screeds about how guns protect us from Government Tyranny, but then they about-face with a cowardly little apology at the end of the article and say, “Hey, I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’m no threat to anyone.” Make up your minds. You are a threat to tyrants, or you aren’t. If you’re a threat to no one, then you’re no threat to tyrants, and this whole defense-against-tyranny thing is empty, posturing bullshit.

“HOME DEFENSE!” the cry goes up. “IT MAKES ME SAFER!”

I posted a long article on this a few years back, in the wake of a different school shooting.

Sorry. It doesn’t make you safer. General prosperity makes you safer: people don’t try to steal from you if they already have everything you have. Psychotherapy and anger-management make you safer, by encouraging you to act out your Inner Asshole less often. Strong communities make you safer. A strong, just government with a sound economy makes you safer. Guns don’t even come in fourth.

“I’M A SPORT SHOOTER!” the cry goes up. “IT’S A HOBBY! THE GOVERNMENT CAN’T REGULATE HOBBIES! THAT’S TYRANNY!”

I don’t even want to waste words on this. Smoking pot is a hobby. The government sure as Hell has been regulating it. And unjust, stupid, and corrosive to civil society as that policy has been, it isn’t tyranny.

I’ve heard only one argument for private use of guns that isn’t complete bullshit, and that’s as a tool used by hunters, ranchers, farmers, and people living in certain rural areas. It’s for use on animals, most of which are going to take off running at the loud noise made by pretty much anything. A pair of cymbals, for instance: which, like a bong, could theoretically be used to kill someone, but even more awkwardly.

So let me turn this around. If you take guns away from these self-reliant, inventive, enterprising rural citizens, I presume they are just going to lie down and be eaten by coyotes. Just like their ancestors did before the invention of gunpowder. Helpless and lost in the face of cruel nature, poor things….

Do I really need to keep mocking this rubbish?

There is no legitimate need for guns within a functioning civil society.

Which brings us to the question: do we have a functioning civil society?

Yes, we do. It’s under considerable stress, but it’s still there.

How do I know this? Because when it breaks down, no one gives a rat’s ass what “the government” says. Let the government declare guns illegal. Let the government declare Christmas fruitcake illegal. Let the government declare peeing illegal. We will all nod, and applaud wildly through the military parades, but we don’t really care what’s illegal — everything is illegal. In a dysfunctional tyranny, people go underground, make their own rules, smuggle contraband, and avoid the government like the disease it is. Until one day, as in the former Soviet Union, people get so tired they just stop playing the game, and the government falls.

Here is the deep paradox of guns. They are of no use in a functioning civil society. If you care at all about the second amendment, or the constitution, or the rule of law, then you believe in a functioning civil society, and there is no need for guns. If there is a need for guns, then civil society has failed, and you’re wasting sentimental breath arguing about the Constitution.

I’m going to run just a little deeper.

The one constant in human history is the rise in human population, a mostly-steady trend for at least the last 10,000 years. Periodically, human society has gone through what a physicist would call a “phase-transition,” a fundamental reorganization, like the shift of water from gas (humidity) to liquid (rain) to solid (snow and ice). Human society reorganizes and finds a true “new normal.” We go from hunting/gathering to village life. We go from villages to warring city-states. We go from city-states to empires. Empires gave way to nation-states. So long as the population keeps rising, we are going to have to keep adapting.

In the last century, we passed through warfare played out on the biggest scale possible: the whole world. That kind of tribal warfare is no longer possible — we are intertwined economically with all of our potential enemies. If we go to war with China, both nations will fall. If the Chinese go to war with Russia, both nations will fall.

We have already moved beyond the possibility of war in the old sense: if we initiate World War III, it will not be a war, it will simply be a catastrophe, like a village that goes insane one night, and half the village tries to murder the other half, leaving alive too few to plant for the next harvest. There are no winners: everyone loses.

We can legitimately argue about whether the present is closer to Heaven or to Hell than where we were a century ago, when war was still possible. I certainly don’t know. I have very little confidence in people: I think we’re going to have that catastrophe, one way or another, and we’ll move back into the more familiar, comfortable place of a dramatically reduced population of feudal overlords and starving peasants. Guns might be useful during that collapse, though I suspect a long knife and knowledge of how to use it would be the better investment.

But if we assume that we continue to move into this strange new world where war, as we’ve known it, is no longer possible — where at a global level we have to “be careful whose toes we step on today, because they may be connected to the ass we have to kiss tomorrow” — then we really need to weigh the role of private ownership of guns.

It think it’s time to call for an outright ban.