New York Times: For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.The Times goes on to cite an article they published detailing how ridiculously easy it is to buy a gun online and how those unchecked purchases have resulted in violence. The idea that we can’t possibly do anything about this, the argument that the bloody, brutal, stupid status quo represents the very best that we’re capable of, is damning indictment of the gun lobby, their pet politicians, and the paranoid cowards who fetishize firearms and fantasize that every slightest regulation is an attempt to strip them of their
Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.
[…]
Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.
“It’s now up to voters to exact a political price from those who defied the public’s demand, and Mr. Obama was forceful in promising to lead that effort,” they write, “Wednesday was just Round 1, he said; the next step is to replace those whose loyalty is given to a lobby rather than the people.”
[photo by Elvert Barnes]
