For those who are hostile to gun rights, this point should still be obvious. Just replace the 2nd Amendment with the 1st. Can the president announce that trans people – or Muslims, Catholics, et al. – no longer have the right to speak or worship freely?

The rhetoric around “trans-terrorism” is, I think, evidence of a kind of hysteria that has gotten way ahead of the facts. I also think, like all moral panics, there is a kernel of truth to be found. There has been an increase of mass shootings by mentally disturbed trans individuals. But no matter how you crunch the numbers, the idea that trans people as a class should be denied their gun rights based on five confirmed trans perpetrators is ludicrous.

After all, according to some estimates, roughly 1 in 4 mass shooters have some military experience or training. That doesn’t mean military service makes one a mass shooter, and any attempt to deprive veterans of their gun rights has historically been met with massive pushback from conservatives.

Still, this short chapter is interesting for other reasons. The Trump administration is terminally online. It takes its cues from social media and sites such as the Daily Wire. That the Justice Department and the Daily Wire were so swept up in the feeding frenzy that it considered an obviously unconstitutional policy — even for clicks — would be surprising were it not so, well, unsurprising these days.

The NRA’s response is a sign that some in the Trump coalition still have the capacity to think beyond the horizon of a news cycle or the remainder of the Trump years. I have no clue what the leadership of the NRA thinks about trans people. But what they do know is that precedents established by a friendly president can be exploited by a future unfriendly one. A momentary victory in the culture war is not worth the price. (Indeed, for gun control activists, this might be remembered as a missed opportunity. Establishing the principle that presidents have sweeping authority to ban guns would have been a massive victory, though the political and moral cost would have been enormous, too.)

Tragically, none of this gets us any closer to any kind of solution to the problem of mass shootings. But maybe learning that such solutions won’t come from pandering to hysteria is a step in the right direction.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.