Salon isn’t the kind of publication most of us pay much attention to, but there are times I think it would be almost respectable except for one writer.

Amanda Marcotte is the queen of bad takes. It’s kind of her thing, I suppose, and Salon lets her keep doing it.

As such, I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s at it again. What she understands about guns, crime, and much of anything seems to be exclusively informed by leftist media narratives, but this is especially stupid.

You have to hand it to Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Their marriage is an exemplar of spousal teamwork. Ginni Thomas worked hard on the inside game for Donald Trump’s coup: exchanging emails with Trump co-conspirator John Eastman, pressuring state legislators to throw out electors that President Joe Biden won and blitzing Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows with potential coup strategies. Meanwhile, her husband just handed the Trump’s volunteer street fighters, the sort of folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, a Supreme Court decision that will make it much easier for them to arm themselves with heavy firepower in the future. 

I don’t need to share more of the op-ed because it doesn’t get any better from there.

First, understand that NYSRPA v. Bruen doesn’t directly mention anything about the purchase of firearms. It doesn’t repeal background checks or waiting periods or anything that might be in place at the state or federal level regarding who can and cannot buy a firearm.

So then how does the ruling make it easier for a bunch of people with no criminal record to arm themselves with “heavy firepower,” whatever the hell she means by that, in the future?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. That’s pretty much the long answer, too.

Bruen was about whether one had a right to bear arms outside of the home. It didn’t, however, overturn licensing. That’s an important point here because Marcotte’s argument seems to be that people will turn the next 1/6 into a bloodbath or something.

However, let’s also remember that 1/6 was carried out by people who are among the most gun-owning demographic imaginable. If they’d wanted to turn it into an actual insurrection and had planned on doing so, they certainly could have.

I mean, think about it. If they wanted to overthrow the United States government, I’m pretty sure gun laws weren’t going to stop them. If a law was, the ones against insurrection itself should have done it, right?

And nothing in Bruen would change that. Absolutely nothing at all.

Oh, it means states have to adopt a shall-issue permitting scheme? So? Unless everyone who shows up to such an event has gotten a permit from Washington, D.C. they can’t lawfully carry unless they have a permit from a jurisdiction with reciprocity. That’s no different than it was on 1/6, actually, and nothing in Bruen says anything about reciprocity.

So why wasn’t 1/6 deadlier? The only person shot was one of the protestors, so why weren’t dozens or hundreds more shot and killed, only this time on the other side? Where were the photos of bleeding Capitol Police officers nursing gunshot wounds or lying dead in the halls?

Look, there are arguments one can make as to why they think this ruling was bad. I’m sure Salon would love to publish all of them, really.

However, Marcotte’s sure isn’t one of them.