If you're looking for someone to blame for the continuing partisan paralysis on gun control after the Orlando bloodbath, I have a candidate for your consideration. And no, it's not congressional Republicans, or the National Rifle Association, although their fingerprints are all over the country's inaction in the face of our unyielding epidemic of gun violence.

My nominee is the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

 Scalia, who died in his sleep in February while on a hunting trip in Texas, gets my nod as the author of the 5-4 majority opinion in the landmark 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.

Now, of course, I'm not saying that Scalia was in any way directly responsible for the murderous rampage of the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, or the perpetrators of the other mass shootings that have ravaged American communities over the past three decades, or even for the lunacy of the gun-waving, Constitution-thumping Cliven Bundy clan and other proponents of the "sovereign citizen" movement.