Is It Time Yet?

(Alas, between the time I wrote this and scheduled it for Wednesday morning there was yet another shooting, this time at a mall in Portland. No details as of now, but it only emphasizes the point.)

Last week conservatives went ballistic when Bob Costas talked on Sunday Night Football about Jovan Belcher shooting his girlfriend and then committing suicide in front of his coach. So, as Jon Stewart wondered on the Daily Show, has enough time passed now to talk about this subject?

I guess the answer is no, because this crap happens every damned day:

• Sunday night a man in Rochester, MN, shot his sixteen-year-old granddaughter when she was coming home.
• Last week in St. Paul, MN, a four-year-old boy shot and killed his two-year-old brother with a gun his father had hidden behind a pillow.
• Last week a father in Pennsylvania accidentally shot his seven-year-old son to death in the parking lot of a gun store.
• Last month a retired State Department security officer shot and killed two teenagers who broke into his house. Byron David Smith shot the boy with a Mini 14 as the kid walked down the stairs, then shot him in the face as he lay on the floor. He then shot the girl as she came down, and she too tumbled down. When his rifle jammed she laughed (she was probably high), so he shot her several times in the chest with a .22 caliber revolver. She was still breathing, so he dragged her next to to the boy and blew her brains out with a shot under the chin.
• Let's not forget criminals that shoot cops (and each other) with guns they've stolen from houses they've broken into.
• And then there's the mass shootings that occur on an almost monthly basis at movie theaters, high schools, colleges, Sikh temples, strip malls, office complexes, etc., etc., etc.

At this point gun rights activists instantly jump up and down, screaming, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people! And those people were idiots!"

Exactly. That's the point. Why the hell do these idiots have guns?

The three accidental shooters obviously lack the mental capacity to use and store weapons safely. Jovan Belcher and mass murderers like Jared Loughner and James Holmes have a history of domestic violence and/or mental disorders. How are any of these nut jobs qualified to own guns?

Voting is every much a constitutional right as gun ownership, yet conservatives are willing to disenfranchise millions of voters across the country to stop a few incidents of voter fraud. And still they are completely opposed to even talking about reasonable measures to prevent 30,000 gun deaths each year. Those deaths are caused by gun suicide, kids playing with loaded guns, accidental discharge by half-witted gun enthusiasts, cuckolded husbands and cheated-on wives, fired employees, vigilantes like George Zimmerman and Byron Smith executing interlopers, murderous rampages by psychopaths and shootings of bystanders in gang wars and drive-bys. There must be solutions to at least some of these problems.

Our per-capita gun death rate is not quite at the banana-republic rate, but it's two to 100 times greater than comparable countries, including Canada, Australia, Germany, England, Italy, Switzerland, South Korea and Japan. Part of it is the stupidity of the war on drugs (which is partly why Latin American has such a  high death rate), but there's more to it than that.

Instead of yelling "Shut up!" every time anyone brings up the subject, conservatives should instead talk seriously about concrete measures to make guns safer and less likely to kill accidentally, as well as keep them out of the hands of people who are too crazy, too dangerous, too incompetent or too stupid to own weapons that can kill at the merest touch of the trigger.

Or consider this: we spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars on airport security every year, taking off our shoes every time we board a plane, and exposing ourselves to X-ray scans to make sure terrorists don't sneak sophisticated shoe and underwear bombs onto airplanes. People with guns kill ten times as many Americans as died on 9/11 every year: we've spent probably five trillion dollars on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, our worldwide war on terrorism and airport security. Yet here in the United States you can buy semiautomatic rifles without a background check at any gun show. Such rifles can hold a hundred rounds and easily be converted to full auto, allowing terrorists -- or kooks like James Holmes -- to pull off a Mumbai-style terrorist attack here. Yet the NRA fought tooth and nail to have the FBI destroy the records of people who undergo background checks for gun purchases.

Even discounting the terrorist bogeyman, consider this: the nitwit who killed his son at the gun store in Pennsylvania could have just as easily shot anyone else in the parking lot. Do you really want dorks like that visiting the same gun store you do?