Martin O'Malley isn’t exactly going to win the Democrat presidential nomination, but he’s giving it the old college try. And gun control is his great idea. Naturally, he begins with the usual expansion of background checks. These are already nearly universal, but O'Malley repeats a debunked statistic that 40% of all firearm sales are conducted without a check. Barack Obama loves that stat, too, but it’s garbage. It originated from a single 1994 phone survey of 251 people, and even then gun grabbers rounded up to 40% who “probably didn’t” buy their gun from a licensed dealer. Basing any policy on such grossly inaccurate statistics is beyond idiotic, but that’s why Democrats keep doing it.

O'Malley’s second major plank is a national gun registry. His proposal states, “Although firearm registration helps advance public safety, federal law actually prohibits creation of a national system for registering firearms. This makes tracing guns back to their sale a slow, cumbersome, or even impossible process. O'Malley will push to revise federal law to establish a comprehensive, centralized firearm registration system, where records would be maintained electronically and indefinitely. All firearms purchases would be recorded and registered at sale, and re-registered when they are resold or transferred.” Aside from the “it’s currently against the law” part, does anyone trust a federal bureaucracy with that information in the age of Obama’s IRS?