This is an opinion column.

Alabama Congressman Barry Moore has ‘em right where he wants them. In his sights. And they can’t even see the red dot on their foreheads.

On all our foreheads, really.

He’s in the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News, talked about on CNN and MSNBC and on news sites from Buffalo to London. So what if they make him out to be a buffoon? That’s the idea.

Moore has sponsored a bill – I hate to even mention it aloud because it’s a dumb bill designed to be a dumb bill to grab attention, distract from real issues, send the left into conniptions, make his hard-right base chuckle and use culture war issues to avoid real governing – but I pretty much have to.

Sigh. He filed a bill to make the AR-15 “the national gun of the United States,” and it drew flies like the pile it was. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado flew right in to co-sponsor. As did New York Rep. George Santos, whose pants are reportedly still smoking from the string of lies that got him elected. What better way for Santos to change the subject of his own failings than by pitching a flaming bag of poop on your porch.

It’s a tight grouping, those four. At least Barry Moore beat the rap on his perjury charge.

But people have been asking me why I haven’t written about this bill, which he unveiled this week at a Troy gun shop. It’s a fair question. I’m just sorry to be writing about it now.

If I’ve learned any lesson watching former Rep. Mo Brooks, and former Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, and state Sen. Gerald Allen, and Donald Trump, and 100 other limited statesmen with unlimited gall and political savvy, it is not to take the worm when I can see it is just bait.

Sure, the outrages are outrageous, and shiny, and get people on both sides of the aisle in a snit. They’ll click on the stories or watch the cable hosts of their persuasion rattle on. At the same time they distract us from true examination of budgets and deficits and schools and the well-being of people in our country, or our communities.

When we fall for every outrage, we leave the mundane behind. But the mundane is what keeps us running.

Some say there is risk in not writing or talking about bills like these, for otherwise they might sneak into law. I think more often the opposite is true. When we bite on the red meat, when we choose to fight on the red meat, then we legitimize crazy as a viable political option.

We allow carnival barkers to set the conversation. When that conversation occurs enough, it is elevated to a debate. When that debate goes on long enough it becomes a platform. And the next thing you know, it is the law.

At least in Alabama, where the guardrails are flimsy.

I used to take the bait all the time. I’d laugh in scorn every year when Allen, a Republican from Tuscaloosa, pre-filed bills that seemed outrageous. Like his perpetual idea of doing away with pistol permits altogether. But who got the last laugh?

Allen did, and Alabama, which has climbed into the top five states for gun deaths, no longer requires such registration.

It’s tougher to imagine a bill like Moore’s passing on a national level, where there is no super majority..

But Moore knows what he is doing. He is taking one of America’s highest honors and greatest responsibilities – being elected to the Congress of the United States – and turning it into a clown car.

Not because he wants it to be a clown car, but because he knows that clown car is his best route to real power.

I’d rather ignore him. I wish others would, too.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.