Knowingly or unknowingly, the liberal writer Marc Ambinder makes the case for laws that allow people who pass security checks and have appropriate training to obtain licenses to carry concealed weapons. “Guns are not going to disappear,” he writes, because there is no realistic or constitutional way to confiscate them — which one suspects is his preferred solution. He decries, as so many liberals do, “the NRA’s stranglehold on politics,” without noting that the NRA’s strength comes from its mass membership and funding from large numbers of small contributions — things liberals usually think are a good thing for an organization to have.

So to reduce the number of innocent lives lost — a goal Ambinder shares with every decent person — he proposes the following: