We often declare that anti-gun lawmakers are coming for our guns. Gun control advocates scoff to their allies in the media and the media takes their word for it. We’re often declared to be trying to muddy the waters or something because the people we say are coming for the guns pinky swear they’re doing no such thing.

We all know better, of course. We’ve seen that the passage of one gun control law simply leads to another being pushed just days later. There’s no endgame for any of their efforts that doesn’t effectively disarm us.

But so many in the media refuse to look at it.

Well, it seems one columnist down in New Orleans just did. James Gill is no Second Amendment superfan (in fact, his column is chock-full of insults against those who value the right to keep and bear arms), but at least he can recognize a horrible bill when he sees one, and in this case, it’s Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee’s HR 127..

All firearms and ammunition would have to be registered and licensed. Applicants for licenses would be required to pass a criminal background check and a psychological test. Safety training would be mandatory. Successful applicants would be required to buy liability insurance. Ammunition with a caliber of 0.5 or greater would be banned. All guns would be listed on a database maintained by the Attorney General and available for public inspection.

Were such a bill to pass, there is no telling how many lives would be saved, but there would be plenty. That will be obvious to the most ardent Second Amendment devotee. It will be just as obvious to gun control believers that it won’t happen.

First, the bill will meet strong resistance from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress whose constituents cherish gun rights.

Second, in the unlikely event that the bill passed, it would never pass constitutional muster in the courts. The Second Amendment says the right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” so the bill would seem to go too far in its licensing requirement alone.

Gun control advocates are fond of pointing out that a license is required to drive a car, which, unlike a firearm, does not main and kill by design. True, but automobiles are also different because the Founding Fathers failed to mention them in the Bill of Rights.

Imagine how the press would squawk if some member of Congress proposed to dilute the First Amendment by statute. What is good for the First must also be good for the Second.

Lee may never get her bill passed, but she will have made the gun nuts even warier of Democratic intentions.

It’s a grab bag of almost everything anti-gunners have wanted over recent years, and contrary to Gill’s claims, it would end up putting more people behind bars for non-violent offenses than save lives by stopping criminals.

However, HR 127 isn’t exactly surprising. The most shocking thing about it is that it has zero cosponsors at the moment, not even among such vocally anti-gun lawmakers as Eric “Nuke ’em All” Swalwell, Maxine Waters, or Lucy McBath. Even they want nothing at all to do with this bill.

That’s because it’s an Overton shifter.

The purpose is to put something out there so absolutely ridiculous that it has no hopes of passing so that the next things they put out look downright reasonable. They can ask for a whole lot and still come up short of where HR 127 would have us end up.

Yet don’t think for an instant that no one wants HR 127 to pass. Plenty of lawmakers would love to see just those measures become law. They just aren’t ready to push that through right now. They want all of it.

It is nice, though, to see at least one gun-control-friendly columnist who will actually acknowledge HR 127 even exists. So many others simply ignore it and pretend there’s nothing to see while still trying to paint us as delusional or something.

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