Guns Don't Protect People, Laws Do

"On Friday, Los Angeles paused for the largest police funeral in its history when it buried Officer Randal Simmons, a 51-year-old father of two and the LAPD's first SWAT team member to die in the line of duty. Simmons was shot dead and Officer James Veenstra was badly wounded when they--along with others in their unit--rushed into a San Fernando Valley home where a disturbed young man had killed three members of his family and was believed to be holding others hostage.
"In Oxnard this week, an eighth-grader walked into a classroom and fatally shot a classmate in the head, apparently because the boy was gay.
"On Thursday, at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student walked into a lecture hall, shot five students to death and wounded 16 other people before committing suicide.
"There have been three other campus shootings since Feb. 8, including one at Louisiana Technical College, where a woman shot two students to death before killing herself.
"Earlier in the month, a gunman in Kirkwood, Mo., burst into a City Council meeting, killed five people and wounded the town's mayor. A few days before that, a gunman herded five women in a suburban Chicago clothing store into a back room and shot them all to death in what authorities believe was a botched robbery.
"All these wrenchingly tragic crimes are linked by a common factor--the ubiquity of guns in America. Given that we're in the midst of the most hotly contested presidential campaign in recent memory, you'd think that all this bloodletting might become a campaign issue. If you thought that, you'd have reckoned without regard to the gun lobby's near-total victory among the politicians of both political parties. The 2nd Amendment fundamentalists who cluster around the National Rifle Assn. are the most successful single-issue constituency in modern American politics."

In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten calls out American politicians for their inability to challenge gun-rights absolutists.