Comforting, was it not, to have Paul Ciancia reaffirm for us all with his assault rifle at LAX, the invincibility of our “Second Amendment rights”.

Liberty, in the strange and perverse interpretation of the National Rifle Association, and in the reactionary lexicon in general, almost exclusively becomes the right to exact physical or economic harm on others free of accountability, from Stand Your Ground laws to the regulatory anemia allowing businesses and corporations to poison their neighbors’ water and air as they see fit.

Let the point be nothing less than emphatic: Whether Aurora or Sandy Hook, whether the Washington Navy Yard or Columbine, whether the other marquee names in mayhem, or the anonymous hundreds of thousands of individual victims of gun slaughter, all are very much the fruits of the demented labor of the murder advocacy of the National Rifle Association, its stalwart Republican fuck buddies, and the occasional NRA-possessed Democrat.

America, the gun promiscuous charnel house, unique among the nations for its plethora of weaponry and the resulting deaths, for its jejune, mythologized gun culture, and its delusional reverence for the iconic firearm, is a wholly invented place, created and promoted, lobbied and advertised, fed to the American consumer with a bastardization of history and a grotesque mangling of the Constitution.

The fiercely pursued campaign across the country, at the local, the state and the federal level for anyone anywhere to own a firearm, and to keep and use it anywhere and everywhere by the pro-murder club has created these, our halcyon days of death by gun: the NRA and Republican elected officials all but co-conspirators in homicide and genocide.

It should be unmistakably clear to all: an individual right to possess a firearm is not supported either by the Constitution or history. In fact, the absence of such an illusory right has been sustained by two hundred years of court decisions, until the current extremist court simply created it.

In a civilized country, which this demonstrably isn’t, the National Rifle Association long ago would have been designated officially a terrorist organization, its bloody extremity, sheer depravity and destructively unhinged propaganda criminalized, or at least stigmatized out of existence.

For our gun proliferation and the murder of innocents that it all but guarantees, it is the murder mavens in our midst we have to thank. Indiscriminate and pervasive slaughter is what the National Rifle Association, their ilk and their fellow travellers have wrought, and will continue to spawn until they are finally stopped.

From Slate, gun deaths since Newtown: Using the most recent CDC estimates for yearly deaths by guns in the United States, it is likely that as of today, 11/3/2013, roughly 29,276 people have died from guns in the U.S.