The only kind of gun control we have in the United States is the kind that locks up black people.

Liberals have a smorgasbord of National Rifle Association contradictions to pillory: two black civilians shot dead by police while carrying guns, one legally; five Dallas police picked off by a black veteran reportedly firing a legally acquired “variation of an AK-style military weapon” amid a crowd peppered with marchers legally but confusingly carrying guns; three more police felled by another black veteran in Baton Rouge.

The acrimonious public debate revolving around the Second Amendment and what property-owning white men of eighteenth-century vintage meant by “the right to bear arms,” however, belies a quiet consensus: actually existing gun control comprises a set of criminal laws supported by Republicans and Democrats alike that incarcerate poor and working-class people, especially poor black men, in very large numbers.