You Too Can Own a Machine Gun for 25 Bucks.

Folks who read my columns on this website know that I have been promoting a very simple strategy to end gun violence in the United States. And the strategy consists of shifting our regulatory approach of guns away from controlling the behavior of gun owners and focusing instead on the lethality of certain kinds of guns.

The fact that there are as many as 400 million guns lying around in the homes of American residents does not, in and of itself, create a situation that results in 125,000 fatal and non-fatal gun injuries every year.

What creates the problem is that we are the only country in the entire world which makes it easy for any law-abiding adult to buy, possess and carry around certain kinds of guns whose design and function is based solely on using such weapons to terminate a human life.

I’m referring to the semi-automatic, bottom-loading handguns carried by police and military units but are also available for personal ownership without anything other than a cursory background check in most states.

I’m not saying that the original purchasers of these kinds of guns are responsible for killing and injuring 350 Americans, on average, every single day. But if hundreds of thousands of these particular kinds of weapons start off in legal hands, sooner or later some of them will end up in the…