Courage vs. carnage

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Dec 14, 2007

TWELVE people are killed and more than a dozen injured in a week's time in three mass shootings -- at a shopping mall and a church, and on a school bus. Almost as horrifying as these heartland shootings is the muted reaction to the tragedies, an almost blase acceptance that such things happen and an assumption that nothing can be done. But something could be done. Weakened gun laws have allowed the wrong people to get the wrong kind of guns.

The AK-47 assault rifle that an Omaha teenager pilfered from his stepfather was among the guns outlawed under the ban on assault weapons that Congress and President Bush unwisely allowed to lapse. Why that kind of gun should be so easily available to someone as troubled as that 19-year-old is unfathomable. Eight people shopping or working at a mall died as a result. Days later, another troubled youth, this time in Colorado Springs, armed himself with an assault rifle, two handguns and as many as 1,000 rounds of ammunition and killed four people. Police have not disclosed how he obtained the guns, but why should anyone have assault weapons or gun magazines with so much killing power? Little is known about the most recent shooting in Las Vegas, except that children and teens were targeted.

One would have hoped that public officials would have taken some kind of responsible action after the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Instead, it seems that the horror over the killings of 32 students and faculty members has numbed people to killings that occur on a lesser scale. How else to explain the ho-hum media treatment of the recent shootings? Or that even the most reasonable of gun laws -- to strengthen the database of those ineligible to buy guns -- remains bottled up in the Senate?

The measure passed the House and even has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, but Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has placed a hold on it, and so it remains stymied.

It's time to recover a sense of outrage and for Congress to work up the courage to enact laws that truly could save lives.

Washington Post

Editorial