The political fight over firearms regulation is not a matter of public safety but a matter of culture war. If you doubt that, consider a related case: We still have on the books anti-switchblade laws that were adopted by states such as Colorado in a national moral panic following the premiere of West Side Story. Without those knife-control laws, the United States surely would have degenerated into a dystopian hellscape straight from the minds of . . . Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.
We should be so lucky. But we Americans remain hostages to the movies, as the pending fight over Texas’s “silencer” law surely will demonstrate.
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