Well, shoot!

"Gun-control advocates, including survivors of the April 16 shooting rampage that took the lives of 32 victims at Virginia Tech, poured into a Senate committee meeting to support a bill that would require background checks for all gun-show sales. They then staged a "lie-in," lying on their backs outside the Capitol to draw attention to gun deaths in Virginia last year." - Washington Post, January 22, 2008.

Eric Severehead, spokesman for the Plato Institute, dismissed the significance of the event. "This is nothing new," he pointed out. "People have been lying inside and outside the Capitol for decades now, may be centuries."

Barflick Loosecannon, the conservative columnist, took issue with the liars - er, the lie-in'ers. "Guns don't kill people. Bullets kill people," he asserted. "All these gun-control advocates would be better off advocating bullet-control."

Your reporter inquired why bullet-control would be more effective than gun-control. Loose cannon replied testily, "Try filling out a background check for every round of ammunition and you'll see."

Jeff Sniper, of the Wacko Institute, weighed in with, "They have more than enough laws on the books, if only they choose to enforce them. We don't need more laws! A good starting place would be with tightening immigration, to keep out all people who have, or are likely to give birth to people with, mental illness."

Shayne Lemorte of the Noxious Rural Assassins emphatically rejected the protesters' demands for background checks at gun shows. "We need more guns, not fewer," he explained. "If Virginia Tech had imposed mandatory gun ownership on all students, Cho would have been shot dead long before he killed 32 of his fell0w students. Archie Bunker taught us a long time that the best way to prevent a hijacking was to arm all the passengers. Just imagine, we could have averted the 9/11 tragedy if the passengers had had a shootout with the hijackers!"

Andrew Moss, a historian, told the protesters there had never been a Scond Amendment right to gun ownership. "It was all a spelling error. Remember, the Philadelphia Convention did not have the benefit of air conditioning. All the Founding Fathers wanted was the freedom to wear short sleeve shirts -- i.e., the right to bare arms."