ICE WATER

Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has brought back the old ice-water challenge for students marching on Washington seeking changes in gun laws.

Grow up and smell the gunpowder, he pretty much said.

Students should realize, apparently, that school shootings are inevitable. Forget about going to Washington and trying to get other people to fix your problems with "phony gun laws." Take some personal responsibility. Learn CPR to help your fellow students when the new normal rises up to say howdy.

(After every school shooting there's a rush to buy backpacks with anti-ballistic properties, but that only helps if the kid's wearing his backpack—and is shot in the back. Still, parents have to do something.)

Forget about gun control, Santorum implies. That ship has sailed. That ship has already sunk in deep waters. That ship has already been raised and salvaged for steel to make more guns.

I get the sense gun enthusiasts consider any attempt to change gun laws to be a political ploy designed to embarrass Republican lawmakers. We all know those guys are in the thrall of the National Rifle Association and cannot act against the folks who put them in office. They have reelections to face, for God's sake!

No action can be taken, and everybody knows it.

Even President Trump, who in a televised meeting happily advocated all sorts of liberal anti-gun notions, seems to have fallen back on a position of merely outlawing bump stocks. It's the very least he can do to look presidential and yet avoid outraging his NRA handlers.

For their part, the NRA wants folks to keep their bump stocks. Then go further, gaining access to native full-auto assault weapons. M4s, or maybe SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapon). After all, the Second Amendment guarantees the ownership of all guns and by extension all gun-like weapons.

(In the giddy postwar 1950s, folks talked about miniature nukes deployed by shoulder-fired weapons resembling beefed-up rifles—not just for the battlefield, but for civilian use like putting out industrial fires. Old hands at the NRA are probably still drooling.)

In reality (but not American political reality) the Second Amendment has been obsolete since the turn of the 20th century, when this country got serious about maintaining a standing army. There's no longer any need to grab Joe Six-pack and his squirrel gun to slap together a militia to defend the homeland.

So, how do we proceed?

First, the Second Amendment would have to be repealed. That will send gun laws back to the individual states. Some, like California perhaps, would outlaw guns of all sort. Others, like Texas, might opt for semi-automatic assault weapons as a baseline.

Folks moving from state to state would find themselves inconvenienced. (Think: gunfire at border-crossing checkpoints.) Eventually, there would come a push for a new constitutional amendment outlawing guns on the federal level—the Anti-Second Amendment.

Of course that goes against America's gun-toting tradition. But we've had other traditions, like slavery, that have—for whatever reason—failed to stand the test of time.

The alternative, I suppose: universal CPR classes.