How Many Deaths Will It Take?

It's after three o'clock, exactly two weeks before Christmas.  You are no doubt at work, which may or may not be at the Mall.  You may be doing some Christmas shopping.  And your older kids may well have headed to the Mall after school as well.

Yesterday in an Oregon mall a 22-year-old opened fire with the semi-automatic rifle he had apparently taken from a friend.  Fortunately, the gun jammed; "fortunately" only two were killed, one seriously injured, before the shooter turned the weapon on himself.

I really need not say that if semi-automatic and automatic guns were illegal, he would have had no one to take the gun from.  Someone's spouse, parent, or grandparent would still be alive.

You may recall the shooting not so many months ago in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, which resulted in the loss of 12 lives.  It would have been more if that shooter's semi-automatic had not jammed -- it had a 100-shot magazine.

Back in July, I watched in shock as our leaders, and the idiots at Fox News, commented that it was too soon to talk about gun control.

They must have been right, because our President, in his comments after that shooting, failed to mention the need for gun control.

In fact, being that irony knows no bounds, Jon Stewart just one day before the shooting, had provided a pretty concise play-by-play of the "when it's not appropriate to talk about gun control" game:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What amazed me most, then, about reaction to this deadly shooting, is that when I turned on MSNBC at noon today assuming the lead would be details about the tragedy, the talk was the same-old same-old bullshit about the damned "fiscal cliff."

What does this mean?  Has the media just decided we've become bored with the details of who's just shot whom?  Is there a minimum-dead rule that has had to go into effect so that viewers are not subjected to 24-7 reports of gun deaths?

I believe it is obvious that the NRA is mad with wealth and power, and that our media and legislators are controlled by the NRA.  This is a terrifying thought.

When a theater shooting ends in debate not of gun control but whether theaters should hold midnight viewings, when purses are searched and pat-downs at "The Sound of Music" are the order of the day, when South Carolina dimwits decide that the solution to crazed shooters in schools is to allow more shooters into schools to fight them off, when Christmas shopping is no longer safe...

...THIS IS THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT GUN CONTROL.