There's a movement in the Legislature to send a message about two issues dear to the hearts of conservative ideologues: gun regulation and state sovereignty. The beauty of the proposed Firearms Freedom Act, in their eyes, is that it wraps the two in a single, neat package.

Like many message bills, however, this one should be a dead letter.

The thinking behind the bill is that the federal government has wrongly exploited the clause in the Constitution that gives Congress power to regulate interstate commerce. That legal doctrine, according to the critics, has extended the tentacles of the federal government into vast areas of American life that have nothing to do with commerce. That federal power has grown at the expense of the powers reserved to the people and the states by the Constitution's Ninth and 10th Amendments, they say.

The wagon the critics have chosen to carry their point is gun rights, which are protected by the Second Amendment. The point of the Firearms Freedom Act is to assert that the federal government has no legitimate constitutional power to regulate firearms that are manufactured in the state of Utah and are not traded beyond its borders. (No interstate commerce, get it?) That's why the official name of the proposed bill is the Utah State-Made Firearms Protection Act.

The strategy behind the bill was hatched by a firearms instructor in Montana. The idea was to pass the law, which Montana did, and if the federal government tries to enforce its firearms laws as they apply to any guns made and used solely in Montana, plaintiffs would challenge that federal authority in court. Just such a lawsuit was filed last month.

Now, Sen. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem, and other legislators want to take Utah down the same path.

If federal gun regulations were onerous, we would be more sympathetic. But they're not. Utah has a flourishing gun trade, and it is the U.S. capital of concealed-carry permits. Federal background checks that seek to stop the sale of firearms to felons and licensing requirements for dealers that seek to control the black market in weapons promote basic safety. They don't prevent law-abiding people from buying private arsenals. And, the U.S. Supreme Court held last year that the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms is a personal freedom not tied to membership in a militia.

So where's the beef? Dayton's bill is about pandering to gun-rights extremists and anti-government fanatics, not about good public policy.