The AR-15 is designed for war. Perfectly designed. It’s the civilian version of the M-16, the go-to-war weapon for decades. The home-version, semi-automatic weapon fires fast and lots: Clips hold 20 or 30 rounds (Mr. Holmes is accused of having used a 100-round drum magazine, like Sylvester Stallone in … well, any movie). They are literally killer machines, weapons of mass destruction.

So, Democrats howled again — but this time, they were right. We’ve got to outlaw those war weapons, they said. Republicans, predictably, played the slippery-slope card. “If they ban high-powered assault weapons, you can bet it won’t be long before they come for our coon-hunting rifles.”…

But here, the Democrats are right: No one needs an AR-15 to, say, hunt rabbits, and their potential danger, in the wrong hands, clearly outweighs any so-called “right” to bear arms. Americans can still possess just about any weapon they want, without government intervention, just not those. Do Americans have a right to a shoulder-fired missile? Of course not. Same thing.

Yet there’s what’s right and what’s political expedient, and never the twain shall meet. Both parties fail the common-sense test when pressed on their core “beliefs,” and both should be ashamed.