Good lord, man. What more can they do for this policy push that they aren’t doing already? You’ve got major network news bureaus using the term “assault magazines,” for cripes sake. When you’ve had a horse pulling a cart for two months, it’s humane to pat him and tell him “good job” before hitching him up again.

Piers Morgan, I’m sure, would appreciate some water and a sugar cube or two.

Vice President Joe Biden said Monday that those who claimed the Obama Administration was trying to take away guns from law-abiding citizens were spinning “a bunch of malarkey.”

“I know that’s a word you’ve never heard before, although it’s now in the dictionary,” Biden said at a roundtable discussion with law enforcement officers in Philadelphia. “That’s just simply not true. And to be very blunt with you, we’re counting on all of you, the legitimate news media, to cover these discussions because the truth is that times have changed.”…

Biden also pledged to bring the fight to rural areas, where instances of gun violence were less frequent than in cities and the tradition of gun ownership is strong. The vice president said he had read reports in a local newspaper that the administration had not done enough to reach out to rural voters.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Biden said.

Times really haven’t changed much, but the White House needs to maintain that fiction to have any hope of passing even the most modest new gun regulations through Congress. While Biden heads to rural America to try to reverse 200+ years of gun culture, Obama will return home to Chicago to make the case that banning “assault weapons” and instituting background checks will do the littlest bit to reduce the lethality of gang violence. And of course he’ll have victims of gun violence as his guests at tomorrow night’s SOTU, just to remind you that if you happen to disagree with Democratic policy preferences for whatever reason, you’re basically in favor of innocent people getting shot.

Exit question: If Biden really wants help from the “legitimate news media” on this, shouldn’t he be asking them to tone it down a bit? One of the White House’s key messaging problems, I think, is that no matter how many times O or Biden or Feinstein swears up and down that they only want to ban a few specific guns, not all guns, there’s some idiot liberal pundit on cable or the op-ed page who quite palpably wants to ban all guns, or at least all semiautomatics. Morgan is the paradigm example. It reminds me of Obama insisting that he’s a federalist on gay marriage even though everyone but everyone knows he’d welcome a Supreme Court decision finding a constitutional right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment. If a liberal Court reversed the Heller decision and ruled that there’s no individual right to bear arms, such that the feds could go ahead and ban private gun ownership outright, it’d be a banner day for left-wing America. No one believes otherwise, thanks in part to the media’s transparent bias on this issue. If they were a bit more circumspect in their cheerleading, maybe gun owners wouldn’t be quite so sensitive to new regulations.