In a better world, a humor magazine wouldn’t be smarter about a society than the people who run that society are.

Oh, damn, right, Charlie Hebdo.

The staff of that French humor magazine were smarter than French society at large about the importance of free speech, even when it takes the form of cartoons insulting a religion.

And look what those smarts got them. Shot dead.

If there’s a “but at least” here, it’s: “But at least the Islamic militants who shot them dead did so because they believed in something. At least those who died in Paris did so because they exercised the right to smartly express themselves.”

The 19 schoolchildren and their two teachers shot dead in Uvalde, Texas? They died for nothing. They were shot out of two crazinesses: First, because the shooter was insane. Second, because our entire nation is insane, so that an 18-year-old boy can walk into the local gun store, buy an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the same time. This, in a small town in which this troubled guy was so well known to be creepy and quite likely dangerous that fathers told their own sons to stay away from him for their own safety.

Ghoulish dude wasn’t macabre enough to scare the gun-store owner, though. Or perhaps he was. It’s just that under Texas law, absent a certain criminal record or an actual diagnosis of insanity, you can buy and open-carry that loaded AR-15 right down to the local elementary school where it will do what it was built to and no one can do a damn thing about it.

Five years ago in these pages, after some other freakin’ mass shooting, I noted how our own nation’s humor magazine, The Onion, ran a parodic story under the headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Now, ever since then, every time there’s another American massacre, The Onion runs the same headline, with a few details of the latest butchering, and the same quote from an Idaho resident: “It’s a shame, but what can we do?,” “echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.”

What can we do?

Oh, how about not voting for a United States senator who once ran used this slogan in a campaign ad: “After Sandy Hook, Ted Cruz stopped Obama’s push for new gun-control laws.”

Or not voting for a governor like Greg Abbott who last year signed seven new gun-rights laws, including one ensuring Texans can carry handguns without a license and another exempting the state from future federal gun restrictions, and then has the gall to tweet that he and his wife “urge all Texans to come together to show our unwavering support to all who are suffering.”

But nope, not for us, the rest of the world’s gun sanity. We live in a nation in which, based on a criminally tortured willful misreading of the Second Amendment, we pretend that our nation’s Constitution simply demands that everyone who wants a gun gets a gun.

A nation in which there is far more commonsense regulation regarding any rights you might have to own and operate a Kia Sportage than a rifle built for mass murder.

It’s our own purely American insanity.

Everyone accepts the necessity for driver education, for subsequent licensing to prove you can safely drive, for registration and, yes, insurance as requirements for owning a motor vehicle.

Is insurance required for the havoc you may wreak while driving an AK? Not on your life.

The Second Amendment was written by some wonderfully cheap American geniuses who, having won the war, wanted to save the citizenry from the expense of continuing to have a standing army. But we ought to have some backup, just in case Canada invades, and so: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

There is not one reference historians can find among the copious notes the framers wrote to any discussion about the Second granting a right for private individuals to keep weapons.

And yet here we are, living and then dying under a clearly sham version of what they truly meant.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].