While the FBI continued to analyze the emails Hillary Clinton thought she deleted and her advisers pressed her to hire a Republican criminal defense attorney in Washington, a madman used a lawfully purchased handgun to kill a professor and eight students at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Looking to change the subject away from her emails, Clinton was quick to pounce.

She who has ripped into Republicans for seeking political gain from the four American deaths in Benghazi, Libya, now seeks her own political gain from the dozens of murdered children and young adults in Newtown, Connecticut, and Roseburg. On the heels of the latter and referring to both tragedies, she launched an emotional attack early this week on the two most recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the personal right to keep and bear arms. She offered to "fix" them should she be elected president.

Her so-called fix consists of a dead-on-arrival legislative proposal making gun manufacturers financially liable for the misuse of their products and an executive order determining the meaning of certain words used in federal statutes.

The liability-shifting proposal is akin to punishing General Motors whenever a drunken driver misuses his Chevy and injures someone. The courts would surely reject that.

The executive order proposal assaults the Constitution. Those in the gun sale business must conduct background checks via computer services offered by the FBI. The background checks look for reports of crimes of violence, domestic violence and mental illness. Private people who occasionally sell their hardware or give guns as gifts are exempt from conducting background checks. Clinton would create a presidentially written and mandated definition of occasional sales and gifts so as to require background checks for all gun transfers — a requirement Congress rejected.

We are 13 months from Election Day 2016, and Clinton has already promised that she would rule by pen and phone rather than govern by consensus.

As a lawyer, Clinton should know that only the federal courts — not the president — can decide what statutory language means. Moreover, if she knew anything about FBI background checks, she would know that they are only as good as the database on which they rely. If a madman hides his mental illness, no database will reveal it.

Her attacks on the Supreme Court decisions were direct. She rejects their characterization of the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right — meaning that it is akin to thought, speech, press, association, worship, travel, etc.

Yet if she were to become president, she would take an oath to uphold the Constitution; that means the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. The presidential oath of office would require that she execute her duties "faithfully" — whether she agrees with the law or constitutional provision or not. She apparently has no intention of fulfilling the presidential oath of office.

We are 13 months from Election Day 2016, and Clinton has already promised that she would not enforce Supreme Court decisions with which she disagrees.

What did both the Newtown and the Roseburg tragedies have in common? Both murderers were madmen. Yet neither had a record of mental illness, so the background checks the anti-self-defense lobby loves would not have prevented either of these killers from buying a gun and using it to murder indiscriminately. If killers are prepared to murder innocent children, does Clinton really think they would obey the laws regulating gun ownership?