Say 'hello' to Jeb's little friend

Jeb (Jeb!) Bush — after spending some $5,000 per vote in his monumentally dismal bid to follow the footsteps of his dad and brother into the Oval Office — may have finally, accidentally, gotten one thing right.

The lagging GOP presidential candidate was eager to show off the engraved ("Gov. Jeb Bush").45-caliber handgun he received as a gift Tuesday after touring a firearms plant on in Columbia, S.C. — so eager that he sent its photo out on his Twitter feed at 3.27 p.m. with this one-word caption:

"America."

Hell, yeah!

I mean, c'mon, Jeb's right. To our citizens and to the outside world, what else could better represent America — a land with 5 percent of the world's population but 35-50 percent of its civilian-owned firearms, with gun homicide rates that continue to tower over any other industrialized nation.

This, for better or worse, is the America that Bush is aspiring, ineptly, to lead. The country where just last month in the heart of Philadelphia, a juvenile fired a .45-caliber handgun so similar to Jeb!'s new pride-and-joy inside Benjamin Franklin High School, endangering his classmates.

The United States where — right there in South Carolina, not so far from where Bush is campaigning — a hate-filled racist named Dylann Roof used a .45-caliber Glock semi-automatic to systematically mow down nine people at a Bible study group, solely because they were black.

Hey, maybe you can't blame the former Florida governor — whose very manhood has been under attack from Republican frontrunner Donald Trump out on the campaign trail for months — for, um, overcompensating with his shiny, 5.3-inch new toy.

It's just that some Americans — and by some, I mean millions — have been hoping for a real debate in 2016 about how to reduce the more than 30,000 Americans every year who are either murdered or commit suicide with a gun.

Shira Goodman, the executive director of the anti-gun-violence group CeaseFirePA, told me tonight that she had seen the Jeb Bush tweet and was most troubled by his notion that a handgun would be the ideal image to represent "America."

"When I think of America, I think of the flag — or I think of kids of different colors and races holding the flag," Goodman said. "That is America to me."

Goodman has been disappointed with the quality of debate on guns so far in the presidential race — and I agree. On the GOP side, Bush's tweet was a new low in a race to the bottom of 2nd-Amendment absolutism, with little concern over how America has become the mass-killing capital of the world, or how to unwind that.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders have heatedly debated their past voting records but haven't well explained the future of how we'll get to stronger background checks or keeping guns away from people on the terrorism watch list — stances supported overwhelmingly by voters in both parties.

This weekend's sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an icon of the American Right, has stunned Republicans with the fear that a new, more liberal High Court will accept sharp limits on the rights of gun owners. That panic surely loomed in the back of the mind of Bush, or maybe whatever young staffer who runs his Twitter feed, on Tuesday afternoon.

Others saw it differently. Many heaped scorn — including the British former CNN host and gun-control advocate Piers Morgan, who called Bush "a gun-slathering fool."

The incident also launched a thousand memes satirizing the Bush gun fetish, many around very different notions of "America." One activist posted the iconic image of heavily armed and armored police pointing their weapons at a young black male in Ferguson in 2014.

But some clearly liked the image. By early evening, Bush had been re-tweeted 14,405 times and the National Rifle Association — which until now had been all but ignoring Jeb! — added him as a "follow."

Only later was that minor victory marred by a Washington Post report that the gunmaker, FN America, is owned by a Belgian firm — "America"? — that was requisitioned during World War II to make firearms for Nazis as well as the Allies.

And so it went in the closest we may get to a political gun debate in "America." Just like Bush's campaign and the new symbol of his masculinity, it seems too way little, and far too late.