It must be some alien master plan that has given us Elon Musk, Jim Cameron, Robert Ballard, the writers for Steven Colbert and a handful of others without whom the United States of America would win hands-down, the ‘Dumbest Nation On Earth’ award.

It seems that an increasing majority of the rest of the 300 million souls who stand on the blood-soaked soil of a fading power have been rendered brain-dead by country music, religion and NASCAR.

In fairness, this opinion derives from the controversy surrounding the 2nd Amendment and prolonged avoidance of the obvious answer to dealing with it. Which is simply to erase it from the pages of history.

Trashing the 2nd Amendment promises immense and far-ranging benefits. Some are obscure, such as the preservation of countless acres of forest lands owing to the greatly reduced volume of newspaper pages devoted to shooting-victim obituaries. Others are more direct and include the great likelihood that without guns to punctuate every grievance, your kid will make it home from school with no open wounds.

The argument that the NRA’s Mr. LaPierre uses to support his dancing feet and other tiny appendages is that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ I find it strange that even those most passionately on the other side of the argument fail to acknowledge that people without guns don’t kill people. At least not with guns.

Imagine if the 2nd Amendment were to be simply deleted and replaced with something like ‘No guns will be allowed in the possession of private individuals outside of areas designated to hunting animals and enabling redneck Republicans to blast away at each other to the benefit of the state.’

As long as the proliferation of guns is allowed to continue, the argument that we need more of them will be encouraged to fester. It will never be possible to counter the notion that equally armed, the shootee might become the shooter and give credence to La Pierre’s conviction that ‘the only thing that will stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.’

Oddly enough, final assurance that Baretta and Browning will continue to prosper comes from the left and the implicit suggestion that guns are okay if they don’t fire too many bullets at one time and if those who have them and will eventually be captured in mug shots first appear on background checks.

This year, the number of shooting deaths in the United States will overtake traffic deaths with over 32,000 largely unarmed souls taking a bullet for the NRA.

If only they’d had guns.