Divvying up furniture while house burns down

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a law barring domestic abusers from owning guns.

That’s a good thing. Obviously.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter, by the way.

Some days earlier, the same Supreme Court — featuring other such stalwarts of integrity as Samuel Alito and Brett Cavanaugh — reversed a federal ban on bump stocks in the United States.

A ban, it should be noted, put in place by the Trump administration.

For the uninitiated, a bump stock is an accessory that can be affixed to a semiautomatic rifle that “bumps” the trigger back into the user’s finger faster than the trigger can be pulled. This raises the rifle’s rate of fire to machine-gun levels.

Do bump stocks work, though? Oh, you betcha.
We know, because on Oct. 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock — a 64-year-old gambler and real-estate investor — used bump stock-equipped rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, slaughtering 60 people and wounding more than 400 others in the deadliest single-gunman mass shooting in U.S. history.

But, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court’s “MAGAjority” decided the Trump-era Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did not have the authority to ban bump stocks, essentially because they are not, themselves, machine guns, and it would take a separate act of Congress to ban them.

Fun.

Although there is no direct line from the above to what’s about to come below, it does strike this newspaper as particularly irritating to watch greater Riverdale’s elected Democrats — who have an eye-fluttering stranglehold on local politics — find ways to not only oppose each other in party-position elections, but snipe, name call, accuse and otherwise try to hurt each other in the process.

It almost feels as though, in the absence of anything resembling a formidable front from the loyal opposition, human nature dictates we must divide into tribes and fight for supremacy no. Matter. What.

It bears pondering: Would there be both a Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club and a Unity Democratic Club if greater Riverdale Republicans had a strong presence?

Would greater Riverdale Democrats still bicker over who’s more radical, or who won’t let whom decide what within the organization?

One would think the biggest tent can be pitched on an empty field. Insofar as legitimate political competition is concerned, greater Riverdale Democrats may as well be the Harlem Globetrotters, with Republicans cast as the other team they always play.

Yes, it’s the Washington Generals. We know.

And at least they show up, even if they’re only there to lose.

By the time this newspaper hits the streets, as we like to say, the latest skirmish between greater Riverdale Democrats will be at an end — as will the race between U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer, which has been embarrassing in its increasing venom — and there will be a chance for factions of the party to reconcile in time to fight the real enemy in November.

And, no, that enemy isn’t President Joe Biden’s age, and it certainly isn’t — or shouldn’t be — each other. For reasons passing understand but no less ominous, former president and current convicted felon Donald Trump is polling, at a minimum, in the high 40s.

The Press fully understands all of greater Riverdale’s elected Democrats oppose, and will fight against, the specter of a second Trump presidency. But the palatability of disunity and infighting among Democrats has tasted ever more bitter this primary season, as, even in New York politics, it sure as hell wouldn’t hurt to concentrate all firepower where it truly belongs.