Indeed, the gun-rights lobby has chosen to ignore history — specifically, the passage by Congress in 1934 of the National Firearms Act, which banned the sale of fully automatic machine guns to the general public.

That law — passed in response to mounting public outrage over the infamous “St. Valentines Day Massacre” of 1929 in Chicago, in which members of “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang were lined up against the wall of a warehouse and machine-gunned to death by members of the Al Capone mob disguised as police officers — was challenged and upheld in a unanimous 1939 Supreme Court decision.

In its ruling, the justices agreed with Congress in declaring that fully automatic machine guns — known as “tommy guns,” the weapons of choice of Prohibition-era gangsters — posed a clear and present danger to public safety that outweighed the Second Amendment right of Americans to own them.

The Newtown Massacre — which in my opinion is far worse than the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in that its victims were predominantly little kindergarten-age children — should prompt Congress to once and for all ban semi-automatic “assault” weapons, such as the AR-15 rifle used by the gunman, Adam Lanza.

The semi-automatic AR-15 is the civilian version of the military’s fully automatic M-16 rifle. And why in God’s name do we need to have AK-47s? The Kalashnikovs were created for use by the Soviet Army during World War II!

These military-grade weapons were designed specifically for use as weapons of war — and that in the wrong hands pose as clear a threat to public safety as the “tommy guns” of the Prohibition era. In fact, they pose a far greater threat, for today’s semi-automatics are much more powerful and deadlier than anything Al Capone could have imagined.

You can’t eat meat from deer that’s been poisoned by dozens, if not hundreds, of bullets fired from an AR-15 or AK-47. No hunter in his or her right mind is going to pump that much lead into the animal.

I categorically reject the NRA’s absolutist position that the Second Amendment right to bear arms includes the right to possess weapons of war designed to inflict maximum death and destruction. It’s time to include these weapons in the 1934 National Firearms Act.