"A republic, if you can keep it."

Did anyone really believe that Pelosi or the Obama administration would not pursue this?

The ball is in Congress's court to craft a compromise in reinstating regulations on assault weapons, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged Tuesday.

During an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Pelosi said that the Congress will work to find some middle ground between the previous ban, which expired in 2004, and the precedent laid by the Supreme Court in a ruling enumerating more concrete gunowners' rights last term.

"We have to find some level of compromise," Pelosi said, citing 53 victims of gun violence nationwide in less than a month. "And we have to rid the debate of the misconceptions people have about what gun safety means."

I'm not going to re-hash the arguments against this here, again, now; this is merely the latest in a long list of "a long train of abuses and usurpations", to quote some scholars that are, for lack of less delicate terms, passé.

We have lost it, ladies and gentlemen. The republic is gone, and the coming days will confirm this assertion in ways that we cannot imagine. Yes, that sounds melodramatic, but who among us could have imagined the Great Depression in 1928? Or the horrors of the First World War in 1912?

Considering the still-active frenzy of firearms-related purchases, is there an expectation that there will be widespread compliance with a nation-wide registration movement? In the fevered dreams of Beltway politicians, perhaps. Perhaps light sweet crude will fall to a permanent $5 per barrel, and perhaps Obama will unleash his unicorn-cavalry and cleanse the globe of nuclear arms forevermore, leaving pot-pourri and Skittles in their wake.

Perhaps it's time for some real change.