On this front, at least, we're winning.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership, two out of the fifty states - Alaska and Arizona - score a big 0 out of a possible 100. According to the Brady Campaign to Promote Victim Helplessness, those two states only avoided negative numbers because they're still on the side of the angels when it comes to mandating college student helplessness, at any rate.

I like the color scheme on their interactive map. States scoring 0-10 get colored in red - and by far most of the country is red. This is so not the way things were going just a few years ago - the right activists are winning, for once.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Truth in Advertising claims "we want modest controls, and not to confiscate guns or make gun ownership difficult for the sake of making it difficult" Yet in any state that scored 100 on their totalitarian little test, gun ownership would be so circumscribed that you really would have to be a nut - or a criminal - to practice it.

The Brady Campaign to Redefine Common Sense claims "Sensible Gun Laws Work!" Yet even the most cursory examination of violent crime and murder statistics by state shows no correlation whatever between the severity of a state's gun laws and the rate of those crimes. By city, the correlation can be negative - DC and Chicago are consistently the most violent cities in the country, and hardly models of firearm freedom.

Yet the Brady Campaign to Prevent Logical Deduction keeps shouting the same old slogans, demanding a return to tried-and-failed nostrums that do nothing but empower predators (and government thugs, but I repeat myself.)

I confess that it perplexes me, because I never expected the old oppressive trends to reverse. But there it is. Rotsa Ruck, Paul.