Obviously, I'm not a fan of gun control. We don't tend to get a lot of anti-gun writers here for some silly reason.

But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of very loud anti-gun voices out there that reach different audiences than we do. They're consistently screeching about how we need to restrict firearms.

That's especially true in light of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. The gun control rhetoric has started and it's not likely to end soon.

But Utah's Sen. Mike Lee figures we need something completely different:

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a Tea Party-turned MAGA Republican, used his personal account to call for less concentrated power in the federal government.

“This would happen a lot less if we didn’t make the federal government and the presidency so ridiculously powerful,” he wrote, sharing a video of the chaos that had unfolded at the rally.

“Let’s push power back to where it belongs”

He added “We need government control, not gun control. Otherwise, tribalism advances at the national level”

In a later post, Lee — a habitual poster of baseless, bombastic claims — said all federal charges against Trump, a convicted felon, should be dropped as a way “take the political temperature down.”

We can clearly see what the Salt Lake Tribune thinks of Lee, but he's not actually wrong. Dropping the charges against Trump would likely bring things down a bit.

But the crux of his argument, needing government control, is perhaps even more important.

Look, we don't generally get into general politics here. We're about the Second Amendment, so I'm going to frame this in Second Amendment/gun control terms, yet it applies across the board to almost any other issue.

During the Biden administration, we've seen how executive power can be used to restrict people's rights. We've seen this elsewhere, but we've really seen it on guns. Yet if you read the Constitution, the presidency isn't supposed to have that kind of power. The Constitution basically lays out that the president has veto authority and is supposed to enforce the laws created by Congress. The office isn't supposed to come with the ability to craft law all on its own.

Yet because it has gotten that authority, the office of the president matters a whole lot more than it should.

Now, the office matters so much that people may well take shots at candidates they despise, particularly when they're doing well in the polls and stand a good chance of winning.

If the office of the president could do little more than veto legislation, which can be overturned, then it wouldn't matter nearly as much who was in the Oval Office. Few would seek to kill presidential candidates because of their views.

The number of people who would want to do that would never be zero, but it would be a lot closer than the status quo today creates.

Unfortunately, there's no chance of that happening no matter who wins. Neither candidate would approve legislation restraining their power and authority to that degree. 

But Lee isn't wrong about how that might actually help.