Here’s a proposal for those who believe unlimited, unregulated gun ownership and gun use are the sole point of the Second Amendment. If you’re so convinced that a firearm improves the safety of you and your family, please move to a neighborhood like South Los Angeles or sections of Philadelphia or Chicago where drive-by shootings are commonplace. Join a gang, if you, must, but come back in a year and a day to tell us how reality has impacted your opinions and notions. If you’ve survived. Or life even matters.

How can I listen to a presidential nominee who more and more looks and sounds constipated?

Or is it more simply his stony, dark heart?

Either way, I wish he’d come clean. This is getting exhausting.

As the calls for Donald Trump to withdraw intensify, we can speculate on the dimensions of a Mike Pence run for the White House.

The reality is that the former governor of Indiana is more qualified for public office than Trump – not only was he chief executive of a $31 billion budget, about six times Trump’s estimated worth, he’s run political campaigns and won, which is more than can be said for the Trumpster, a pitiful novice.

Bland as he is, and with all of the baggage he carries from his terms as a Hoosier politician, the question would be whether Pence could reclaim enough votes from the Republican exodus to beat Hillary Clinton. Would he be too tarnished by his association with Trump – and the reality that he was Trump’s third choice, after Chris Christie and John Kasich? Think of all the high-ranking Republicans who have already endorsed Clinton. That would make for a lot of backtracking.

Or would he appeal only to the aging white males who are the last stand of the GOP? For that matter, would they even remain or abandon the cause altogether, now that their buffoon ranting head has abandoned them?

Equally intriguing would be the thinking within the Clinton campaign. How would her team retool its ads and strategy in reaction? Can Pence move deftly enough to escape the inevitable bee stings or poisoned arrows? Does he have any foreign policy expertise to counter hers? As senator from New York, she can easily match his command of domestic policy. I’d say he’s vulnerable on both fronts. At the moment, the presidential race has come down to a rejection of Trump more than an affirmation of Clinton, who lacks the enthusiastic following Bernie Sanders engendered, definitely. In the end, I keep looking at Clinton as the qualified boss I’d like at the head of the operation, no matter how I feel about her personally. Dating, were it an option, would be out of the question. That seems to reflect much of the energy I’m seeing around me. Besides, Scorpio and Aquarius are in opposition. As she finds in her husband’s Leo.

Put another way, Pence is a lot less sexy than Clinton, even when we’re not talking about marriage or fidelity.

Well, that brings up the question of Trump’s withdrawing. As in withering, otherwise known as going flat. Since he’s the one who slipped his schlong into public discussion back when, this only seems fair, even before the anarchist statues.

Now, should we mention the Yiddish term schmuck?

Well, as I was saying? Where is Bernie, anyway?

Normally, two years after the presidential election, the makeup of the House and Senate backs away from the party that wins the White House. But this time, in 2018, I’m wondering about the influence of Bernie Sanders and whether he can push it in the opposite direction – in this case, to the left.

Put another way, he’s enough of a veteran of the hardball politics to know you win some and lose some; it’s all about averages. This time, though, if the Democratic Party captures the political center, as it’s poised to do, the opportunity may be to push left in two years for that shift in some districts, rather than right, in reaction to White House positions and some inevitable voter disappointment.

Much would depend on Bernie’s ability to harness the enthusiastic youth from his primary campaign for local and regional races, as well as U.S. House and Senate drives. Achieving his progressive promises requires majorities in both halves of Congress, rather than the obstructionism of the Republicans during the Obama administrations in the aftermath of disastrous low voter turnout.

Call them Green Democrats, if you will, but they could be Bernie’s biggest legacy, with more clout than if he’d won the presidency.

The thought alone is tantalizing, even if the work ahead proves daunting.

A parallel development in other districts might be the emergence of centrist Democrats, which is fine by me. The national party, Republican or Democrat, is ultimately a coalition, state by state. I’m all for increasing a diversity of representation, meaning the people rather than the One Percent Citizens United.

As the Donald J. Trump campaign illuminates the deep fissures in the Republic Party itself, the questions of the party’s future run rife.

Is its “tea party” movement dead, a victim of being bought out by big money? Can the conservatives continue to coexist with libertarians, and the other way around? Where would the vitriolic Trump core go? What about the Establishment wings of Wall Street money or Main Street businessmen, each of them of a pragmatic streak? Can any of the factions emerging from the Republican Party move to the moderate center where the independent voters cluster? Who would be welcomed and who would be scorned? We’re seeing how Trump despises everyone but aging white males – and like it or not, he’s the voice and the face of the party.

I had thought the Libertarian Party would have made more inroads than it has in the current climate, but I’m sensing that for many disenchanted Republicans, the pro-choice stance has to be a deal-breaker. Could be, too, Gary Johnson’s just too hippie for staid traditionalists of the Romney-Bush-Huckabee mold.

Step back, though, and you’ll see another dividing line running through each of the party’s constituencies. Any question of realignment would have to rest on the abortion issue.

It’s enough to make you wonder just what’s been holding them together, isn’t it? Or if there’s enough commonality to continue.