Bill Straub: Guns are the problem; to say otherwise is ridiculous — as well as dangerous. Stop.

The Republican Party oftentimes appears to have been overtaken by zealots who have succumbed to what can only be described as a philosophy of willful ignorance. No matter the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they stick to their partisan guns – oftentimes quite literally – for the simple reason they choose not to believe.

It’s clear, for instance, that human activity is the primary motivator behind global climate change and that action is urgently required to right this planet. Yet a decided number of right-wingers scoff at the notion, fearful that any steps to address the critical problem will somehow harm the nation’s economic health.

Then there are the defenders of coal who refuse to acknowledge that market forces like cheaper alternatives and environmental concerns are the reason behind the industry’s decline, rather than a make believe “war on coal’’ that they cite to convince understandably desperate miners that it is somehow on the comeback trail.

And then there’s guns.

Listen to the likes St. Matt the Divine, the governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and state Rep. Stan “Cotton Mather’’ Lee, R-Lexington, and you will somehow notice that semi-automatic firearms, bump stocks and ammunition magazines really are just a trivial subplot, a diversion, to the 30 mass shootings that occurred in the United States this year through Feb. 14, resulting in two deaths at Marshall County High School in the Jackson Purchase, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fl., and numerous others.

Sandy Hook

The easy availability of guns isn’t really worth mentioning to St. Matt Bevin and Lee. It’s clearly a distraction to the real problem besetting these United States – the culture.

“We drove God out of the schoolhouse,’’ Lee said in a floor speech. “What do you expect? Do you really expect evil not to come through the doors? Is that what we really expect?’’

Well, yeah, buy go ahead, you’re on a roll.

The school shooting epidemic, Lee said, has come about because “We’ve driven all sense of right and wrong out of the schools, because we’ve driven morality out of the schools, because we’ve driven God out of the schools.’’

St. Matt, in the meantime, liked his blaming the deaths on a deteriorating culture so much that he took his show on the road, appearing on WHAS-AM in Louisville and Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News to spout his own, copyrighted, indubitable brand of nonsense.

On the Carlson show, St. Pat breezily dismissed the proliferation of guns as the cause of the shootings, focusing instead on television violence and video games without citing a single critical study to bolster his argument.

“I would submit that we have become significantly desensitized to death and to violence and we are training children, whether we intend to or not, whether it’s anyone’s desire or not, through video games, through movies, through musical lyrics, through television shows increasingly during prime time even, the amount of violence is increasingly realistic, increasingly graphic, and there is a cost to this.’’

Our mores as a society, he said, “have shifted to the degree that they’re largely non-existent.’’

Sandy Hook

In an odd way, and everything regarding St. Matt seems to take a strange turn, the governor is right. It is the culture, the gun culture, which places more value on the right of an individual to own a military-style weapon, pretty useless for hunting or even protecting one’s home, than the lives of 20 five and six-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CN, in 2012 and 17 Florida teenagers earlier this month.

That’s not just weird. That’s obscene. And to try and act like semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 – used in both Sandy Hook and Parkland – are hardly a bit player in this path of death and destruction nears the level of evil.

And why in the world would someone lay the blame for this on snubbing the deity? One would have thought it would be sort of be pretty near impossible to give a wise, all-knowing God the old heave-ho from anywhere, not to mention the schoolhouse.

The fact is more people attend church on a weekly basis – 47 percent – in the United States than places like France, Germany and England where mass shootings occur at nowhere near the rate seen in America. Do they receive a special dispensation for some reason?

All this because public schools haven’t been able to permit teacher-led Christian prayers at the beginning of the school day since 1962? As columnist George Will once observed, as long as there are math tests there will be prayers in public schools.

And don’t kid yourself. Mass killings, almost always with guns, are nothing new in the republic. Al Capone’s gang famously slaughtered seven opposition gang members on St. Valentine’s Day 1929. On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman entered the observation deck atop the Main Building at the University of Texas in Austin and, from that perch, proceeded to kill 14 people while wounding 31.

But mass shootings are happening more frequently as the number of guns in circulation continues to rise. According to the Congressional Research Service, there are about twice as many guns per capita in the U.S. as of 2016 than there were in 1968 – in excess of 300 million. No other nation has more than 46 million. A study by the Small Arms Survey, based in Geneva, Switzerland, found that there are 112.6 guns per 100 residents in the U.S. Second was Serbia with 75.6.

Gun sales, in fact, continue to rise. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported that domestic gun-makers produced almost 11 million guns in 2013 – twice as many as were made three years earlier. A vast majority of them remained within these shores.

Americans constitute about 4.4 percent of the global population and own 42 percent of the world’s non-military firearms. There are between 5 million and 10 million AR-15s in America, the semi-automatic rifle that has recently been favored by mass shooters. It was marketed beginning in 1959 but didn’t really proliferate until the patent expired in 1977.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

A study by Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, in 2015 found a correlation between a country’s rate of gun ownership and the odds it would experience a mass shooting.

Appearing on MSNBC recently, Lankford explained, “We’re number one in the world in total firearms owned, total firearms per capita and public mass shooters. And those things according to my statistical research’s empirical findings are directly connected.’’

More information could be considered except Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed a law in 1996 prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from expending funds to “advocate or promote gun control.’’ While the provision didn’t expressly forbid the CDC from looking into gun-related deaths, lawmakers simultaneously reduced the Centers’ budget by the same amount it spent on such research, sending a rather obvious message.

Getting rid of semi-automatic weapons, and certainly bump stocks, used to convert the semi-automatics to automatics, will save lives.

Semi-automatic rifles, also known as assault weapons, were indeed banned from 1994 to 2004. A study published in Public Violence @ A Glance, found that the number of victims wounded or killed during the ban declined and then rose when the ban was lifted.

“On average, mass shootings during the assault weapons ban victimized fewer people, and killed fewer people, then they did before or after it. Was this because high-capacity magazines and so-called assault weapons were harder to obtain? It does seem possible that when tools that facilitate shooting large quantities of bullets are more widely available, mass shooters would hit and kill more people.’’

Like someone firing from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel, utilizing an arsenal that included AR-15s and bump sticks, that killed 58 people attending a country music concert.

Insisting that guns aren’t the problem is not only ridiculous, it’s dangerous. It has to stop.

By the way, a special prize goes to our favorite congressman, yes, the Wonder Boy, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, who has turned making a fool out of himself into an art form. His idea is to repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and permit teachers to pack heat, making show-and-tell real interesting in some classrooms.

More guns. More lives ruined.