It’s “Daily Show” alum Samantha Bee, now with her own show serving up the same comedy comfort food for liberals that her alma mater did. Deep question: Why is it that you can walk into a gun store anywhere in America and buy a lethal weapon but you can’t walk into NRA headquarters and buy a costume for their trademarked mascot? Why does the NRA care more about limiting access to the less dangerous item? By the same token, I guess, why is it that I can buy a giant serrated “assault knife” from any number of retailers but I can’t buy the coat off of Samantha Bee’s back? Doesn’t she agree that large knives should be harder to obtain than the items in her wardrobe?

Charles Cooke’s already written up how stupid this is. Guns are a good you’re constitutionally entitled to own. The mascot is the NRA’s own intellectual property. The point of property rights is to restrict who can use that property. Asking why the NRA is more worried about access to its mascot than access to AR-15s is as much of a non sequitur as asking why the rights to Planned Parenthood’s logo aren’t as freely available to the public as abortion is. In one case an advocacy group is defending a liberty interest from what it fears will be remorseless government incursion; in the other case it’s protecting its own stuff from people who want to exploit it for financial or political gain. And do note that the NRA’s mascot is used to teach … gun safety to kids. Any theories on why the group might be picky about who gets to wear their costume for that? Why might an organization want to be extra careful in choosing its public ambassadors to children on the subject of handling deadly firearms?

The bit about Sudafed is stupid too:

It is notable that when Bee finally compares like with like — that is, when both of the products within her comparison are available on the open market — she has to resort to debunked lies. “It turned out the organization that makes it easier to get a gun than Sudafed . . .” Bee claims at one point. This is false. In truth, both guns and Sudafed are regulated in all 50 states when they are purchased from a professional dealer. Moreover, as anybody who has bought both knows, it is infinitely easier to buy Sudafed from a pharmacy than to buy a gun from a dealer, and easier, too, to buy Sudafed from a secondary seller than it is to buy a gun privately.

Whatever. Thanks to “The Daily Show” and its few successful spinoffs, like John Oliver’s show, “clapter” nonsense like this will be with us forever. Just remember the next time you see the annual data for terminated pregnancies in the United States that Planned Parenthood has plenty of lawyers on standby to defend its intellectual property too. And why wouldn’t they?