Vin Suprynowicz

What’s that? The next presidential election is still 14 months away?

Sorry, but Americans are sports fans, and they’ve expressed a growing preference for the multi-level “playoff.” Not enough anymore for a team to be quietly awarded a trophy or “pennant” for simply winning the most games over the course of a long season. No. Now we need Cinderella “wild card” teams, quarterfinals, division championships, all leading up to a “Super Bowl” or “World Series.” Look at the constant hand-wringing over the fact that college football doesn’t lend itself to this structure due to some old-fashioned notion that “student athletes” should get back to taking classes and exams after a brief 12-week season, instead of spending most of the winter playing their way to the top of some “playoff pyramid.”

And our biggest sporting event is the presidential election, and our TV-addicted masses want to see those horses out there slogging through the mud, darn it.

Oh, the Democratic Party is the party of quotas, no mistake. This was the gang, after all, who turned the Space Shuttle program into an Affirmative Action carnival (“Let’s see; we’ve sent up a schoolmarm “astronaut” and a black “astronaut,” what’s next? Openly Gay Lesbian? Pacific Islander? A midget? A Belgian?) Still swelled with pride that they were open-minded enough to elect a black president (even if he turned out to be a fellow with a somewhat limited grasp of free-market economics), they’ve now been preparing to prove to us they’re big-minded enough to nominate a woman, as well. Hillary Clinton could have been expected to win their nomination by acclamation, if they’d just scheduled their convention last month.

But no, two rounds of highly schizophrenic mud-wrestling are required, with occasional comic interludes featuring Donald Trump jumping out of the Clown Car. From now through July, the Democratic candidates must run as far to the Left as possible in order to please that small minority of geriatric Americans who remain registered Democrats. Then will come the home stretch next fall, during which the Democratic nominee has to convince the electorate that he or she is in fact a totally different person from the one we saw in those primaries back in March — a “moderate” with no discernible regulation-crazed, gun-grabbing collectivist platform at all.

So, who do Mrs. Clinton’s handlers fear might “get to her left” and upset her in some early primaries, as happened eight years ago? Weirdly enough, those names today would appear to be Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley. (Who?)

Bernie Sanders is drawing good crowds by pushing for a higher minimum wage (outlawing the starter jobs of black and Hispanic teen-agers), “free” poor-quality health care for all on the Soviet model, and even more economy-wrecking “environmental protection” to defend us against Global Warming.

OK, he’s a lunatic. But she can’t say that. So how the heck to you “get to the left” of an openly avowed socialist?

He voted to ‘shield gun makers’

You’ve been waiting for the word, haven’t you? Guns. Bernie Sanders is from Vermont, a state which allows anyone — even visitors from out-of-state — to carry a gun without a permit. Even worse, the predictable result is that Vermont has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the nation. Oh, the humanity!

Yes, yes, Sanders voted for “more background checks” and the Bill Clinton bans on normal-sized magazines and so-called “assault weapons” — semi-automatic target rifles designed to look like select-fire M-16s or AK-47s. But the junior senator from Vermont made a fatal mistake — in the view of Mrs. Clinton’s handlers — when he also voted in 2005 for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which bars victims of the criminal use of guns from suing manufacturers whose products work as they’re supposed to.

“If somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer and that murderer kills somebody with the gun do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible? Not anymore than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beat somebody over the head with a hammer,” Sen. Sanders told CNN this summer, after a federal court, citing the PLCAA, ruled parents of a victim in the 2012 movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., had to pay $200,000 in court costs after they unsuccessfully sued Lucky Gunner, The Sportsman Guide, and BTP Arms for selling firearms to the shooter. (The theater was evidently chosen by the gunman – over others closer to his home — because the owner had posted signs barring patrons from carrying legally owned weapons to defend themselves.)

So, it’s obvious: Simply make this white-haired former mayor of Burlington out to be some kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike, lumbering around with a big Squad Automatic Weapon, anxiously seeking an opportunity to shoot up the nearest elementary school.

To accomplish that, Mrs. Clinton now dares to touch the electrified third rail of American politics. Since the June shootings at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. — where the victims included pastor Clementa Pinkney, who in his capacity as a state legislator had voted against allowing churchgoers in his state to carry handguns to defend themselves — Mrs. Clinton has added “toughening the nation’s gun laws” to her standard stump speech, the Washington Post reports.

That’s a big change, Philip Rucker of The Post reported in early July. “For at least the past several decades, Democrats seeking national office have often been timid on the issue of guns for fear of alienating firearms owners. . . .

“But in a sign . . . of Clinton’s determination to stake out liberal ground in her primary race against insurgent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — Clinton is not only initiating a debate about gun control but also vowing to fight the National Rifle Association,” Rucker reports.

Like the scorpion stinging the frog who offered him a ride across a swollen stream in the old folk tale, the Democrats simply can’t help themselves.

“We’ve been down this road before with the Clintons,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told the Post through a spokesman. “She needs to read her husband’s book.”

In his highly selective memoir, “My Life” (Mena Airport? Juanita Broaddrick? Kathleen Wiley? Monica Lewinsky? Who?), former president Bill Clinton suggested that his vice president, Al Gore, lost the 2000 presidential election in part because of backlash in states including Arkansas and Tennessee over the Clinton administration’s 1995 ban on so-called assault weapons, which has since expired. Many Democratic lawmakers also lost their elections after gun-control votes.

But if the Democratic nomination hinges on gun control credentials, what about former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, widely acknowledged to have the strongest gun-control record in the field? He supported a ban on so-called assault-weapons as mayor of Baltimore in the early 2000s, and then signed one into law as governor in 2013, along with a package of restrictions on gun ownership that are among the nation’s toughest.

(“Every time there’s a mass shooting, we’re told now is the time to hop on the gun control bandwagon,” noted Susan Stamper Brown, July 27 at townhall.com. “We’re expected to ditch logic, facts, and common sense — or statistics proving gun control never works. We should overlook irritating facts like lawlessness prevails in places which already have stringent gun laws like . . . Baltimore, Maryland, which, incidentally, made the ‘25 Most Violent Places in the World’ list in 2013 and 2014, along with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Baghdad, Iraq and Mogadishu, Somalia,” Ms. Brown continues. “Should we ignore statistics showing despite Maryland’s highly restrictive gun laws, Baltimore’s homicides increased in the first five months of 2015 by 43 percent, and non-fatal shootings by 82.5 percent? When recently asked about the chaotic mess that is Baltimore, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest says more gun laws should help.”)

Front-runner often jinxed

David “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic strategist based in conservative rural Virginia, warns that Mrs. Clinton’s focus on guns could taint the entire Democratic ticket. “Never in the history of the Democratic Party have they started a gun debate that didn’t cost them numbers in the general election,” Saunders, who supports the candidacy of former senator Jim Webb, D-Va., told the Post. “She’s trying to get to the left of Bernie, obviously, but I think it’ll hurt her in the long run. . . .”

Requiring background checks “on all gun purchases” supposedly polls well. But I’m not the first to suggest that — with Obamacare working to create a centralized government database of all our health records — it will soon by easy to link those medical records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System as a basis for large-scale gun ownership disqualifications.

Disqualifiers could eventually include “diagnosis of depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, the prescription of various drugs including anti-depressants, mood elevators, sleep inducers, any hint of illegal drug use including medical marijuana,” as one commentator on the Washington Post Web site noted, beneath Mr. Rucker’s article. “Millions upon millions of American, . . . anyone at all who partakes of our multi-billion dollar healthcare industry, may very well be told their next gun purchase background check is denied” — for reasons having nothing to do with criminal acts.

No, I can’t tell you which interchangeable front man (or woman) for the Federal Reserve banksters is going to be elected president next year.

But trust me, assuming Mrs. Clinton doesn’t get whupped in the primaries by some young upstart who realizes what the REAL issue is going to be, 14 months from now (like maybe, I dunno, call it a longshot, THE COLLAPSING, JOBLESS ECONOMY?), the day she sews up the nomination (if she does) will be the last day you hear her talking gun control. Until she’s in office, anyway.

In her 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton stayed nearly silent on guns, except to condemn Mr. Obama as an “elitist” after his “cling to their guns and religion” gaffe, whereupon she fondly recalled her father teaching her to shoot as a little girl at her grandfather’s Pennsylvania lake house.

That’s the Hillary Clinton you can expect to hear from, next fall. Why, they might even show her sitting on the dock, pointing the muzzle of a little .22 rabbit gun at her own foot. Who knows?

Vin Suprynowicz, former columnist and editorial writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of “Send in the Waco Killers,” “The Ballad of Carl Drega,” and the new novel about rare books, Jesus of Nazareth, and the War on Drugs: “The Testament of James.” A version of this column appears in the Sept. 10 edition of “Shotgun News.”