HOMELAND KILLING FIELDS

Columnist Tim Rutten has it right. The U.S.A. is fast becoming one of the world's great killing fields.  The major factor in this shameful phenomenon is the proliferation of guns. Thanks, in large part, to the National Rifle Association's deification of these instruments of death, the U.S. leads the world -- well, with the exception of our U.S.-created killing field in Iraq -- in murders and violent deaths. Guns kill about 80 Americans a day here in the U.S. and wound twice that many. We've been on a real run lately, with the 33 killed at Virginia Tech last year to the six at NIU earlier this year. Interspersed were 6 at a town council meeting in Missouri and 9 at a mall near Omaha. Those are in addition to victims who went down one or two or three at a time. Worse can be expected ahead.  The NRA is not satisfied with the estimated 200 to 250 million guns in the U.S., one for every sentient adult in the country.  Our gun controls are internationally famous for their absence or laxity, again thanks in large part to the NRA whose members will apparently not be satisfied until everyone in the country over the age of six is armed with one or more guns -- preferrably more than one. No other developed nation suffers anything close to the killing we do. Now the NRA is on a virtual crusade pushing for state laws that would allow employees, students, shoppers, library patrons and even church goers to arm themselves with concealed weapons!  Their rationale is that if everyone is armed, no one would dare to shoot you because they'd be afraid that you could outdraw them. (Thanks to columnist Tom Teepen for that observation.)  Of course, the gun culture in the U.S. is only the most obvious aspect of the problem.  The entire culture of violence is at the root of what is wrong.  It's hard to find a video game, or a movie that doesn't feature violence of some kind.  Kids learn that killing others is just a part of life.  Yesterday's headline should be the only proof we need, when we discovered that a group of third grade girls and boys had developed a rather sophisticated plot to murder their teacher!  That the plot involved handcuffs, duct tape and a knife and not a gun, should be little consolation.  You think that scenario is scary?  The really scary thing is that in the current election campaigns, there is hardly a whisper about our culture of violence here at home. Los Angeles Times columnist, Tim Rutten, takes a look at that phenomenon in today's featured article. It was published in Liberal Opinion Week, http://www.liberalopinion.com.  --  Bryce   

You Can't Pray Away Guns

By Tim Rutten

(February 2008 was) a grim and bloody month on one of the world's greatest killing fields -- the United States of America.

On Friday (Feb. 15), 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 L.A.P.D.'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 home where a disturbed young man had killed three members of his family and was believed to be holding others hostage.

A bit farther up the coast in Oxnard, (the week before) an eighth-grader walked into a classroom and fatally shot a classmate in the head, apparently because the boy was gay.

(The day before Officer Simmons death) 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 had been three other campus shootings (between Feb. 8 and 19), including one at Louisana 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 Second Amendment fundamentalists who cluster around the National Rifle Association are the most successful single-issue constituency in modern American politics.

The truth is that guns make the malicious, the malcontent and the mad powerful. They confer the power of life and death on the demented and the deranged -- and yet we do nothing.  There are more guns circulating in the U.S. today than ever, somewhere around 250 million according to projections by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The only one of the candidates who even nodded to the Illinois college massacre was Sen. Barack Obama, who happens to vote an easy drive from the campus.  Campaigning in Wisconsin, he said "prayers" were with the victims and their families, then quickly added that he believes the Second Amendment confers an "individual right" to gun ownership.

The reason for that bob and weave is that the latter point is the gun loggy's current cause celebre.  Over the years, 11 of the 13 federal appellate districts have held that Second Amendment rights are collective, pertaining , as the Constitution says, to the maintenance of "a well ordered militia."  Recently, however, a court in the District of Columbia struck down that jurisdiction's handgun ban, ruling that the Second Amendment confers individual rights to gun ownership. The case -- District of Columbia vs Heller -- is before the Supreme Court.  Vice President Cheney, 55 senators and 350 members of the House have filed a brief supporting the individual rights position to which Obama hastened to show such deference.

It isn't as if our lawmakers aren't willing to do something to protect our students.  Twelve state legislatures -- those in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington -- are considering bills that would allow students who obtain concealed-weapons permits to carry guns on campus. Presumably, they'll only fire in self-defense.

Confronted with this sort of social idiocy, it's hard to know whether to chortle or choke.

How many times can we really stomach another politician telling us, as Obama did (after NIU) and Bush did after Virginia Tech -- that their "prayers" are with the victims of that day's gun-inflicted atrocity?  Prayers won't bring the dead back or make the living safer.  Our children don't need prayers; they need leaders with a modicum of courage.

Nobody is asking anybody to commit political suicide.  But it would be better than edifying to watch just one of these dreary temporizers exhibit a fraction of the courage Randal Simmons, James Veenstra and their comrades showed when they put themselves at risk for people they believed were hostage to violence.

At the moment we are a nation held hostage to the pandemic of gun violence. We need leaders brave enough to admit that, and to offer out children something more than a collective shrug and the chance to join the arms race that has made our school campuses a killing ground.

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