Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall has given a new meaning to MAGA: Make America Gangsters Again.
When I saw that Marshall had posted on Facebook that he’s sponsoring a bill in Congress to bring back sawed-off shotguns and rifles, the first thing I wondered is whether he plans to join the Crips, or the Bloods.
I can’t imagine anybody else ever needing or wanting one.
Or maybe Marshall is just nostalgic for the Prohibition/Great Depression era, when a gangster could walk into a restaurant with a scattergun under his trench coat and turn his rivals into mobster tartare.
You know, the good old days.
The bill Marshall is arguing for is called the SHORT Act. It gets its name from the amount of thought that went into it. Just kidding.
It really stands for Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today. And Marshall appears to be totally serious.
Opines Marshall: “The SHORT Act takes a step toward rolling back nonsensical regulations that the NFA has placed upon gun owners. I challenge my colleagues to pass this legislation and join me in fully restoring and protecting our God-given Second Amendment rights.”
OK, there’s a lot to unpack here.
The first thing is that the article in which Marshall made that comment, and which he linked to on Facebook, is from the website Townhall.com.
Talk about ironic — and unintentionally hilarious.
Marshall has developed a severe allergy to town halls as of late, as he enjoys (or maybe not) the national spotlight he earned for bolting out of his own town hall meeting in Oakley on March 1.
He stalked off the stage 20 minutes early after constituents of his — some of whom drove as much as 10 hours round trip to the remote community — started demanding he address their concerns instead of giving canned responses to spoon-fed questions.
The Bonnie and Clyde connection
The NFA that Marshall references is the National Firearms Act of 1934, which established extremely strict rules that are a more or less de facto prohibition on civilian ownership of short shotguns and rifles.
The same act covers machine guns and silencers, by the way.
It came about because those were the weapons of choice used by organized crime syndicates in big cities and deadly outlaw bands that ravaged the countryside in the early 1930s.
Probably the most famous practitioner with short-barreled shotguns and rifles was a Second Amendment patriot named Clyde.
