Let the (Fake) National Gun Conversation Begin

A person who might benefit by gun control, or one would think.

Okay, maybe it's not fake, but it will probably be completely ineffective. Already the Republicans (the retrograde party) is lining up against any and all attempts to end our obsessive killing machine we call "gun rights." Thanks, NRA.

Here's a WaPo article about a senior GOP representative, Cathy McMorris Roddgers warning that:

I think we have to be careful about new, suggesting new gun laws. We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions and make sure that we’re enforcing the laws that are currently on the books. And yes, definitely, we need to do everything possible to make sure that something like this never happens again.

Right, Ms. Rogers. Let's do nothing so that we can do nothing right after the next one, and the next one, and...

More to my taste is this spot-on critique by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker of what's really going on with the NRA and the gun nuts, and Republicans:

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

Read the whole thing.

If there's a glint of hope it's in this day-after reporting in the WaPo giving us the straight dope on how out of the norm is our gun culture when compared to other developed countries. The charts drive the point home. Sample:

Yeah, great. We have 40% more guns per 100 people than fucking Yemen. Good on ya, NRA.

Oh, and just one more for the trash-talking brigade. Mike Huckabee says that the Newtown shooting can be explained by the fact that "we have systematically removed God from our schools." Right. We have an omniscient, omnipresent God who lets us little fuckers keep Him out of our schools so we can blow the fuck out of our children. Yeah, that's the God I want to believe in. And to think Huckabee was once considered presidential material. Holy crap.