These folks are confusing gun control with the impossible task of shredding the 2nd Amendment. I have no interest in modifying the 2nd Amendment as it stands. Gun control is about reasonable regulation to help mitigate an epidemic of spree killing. Most people would even agree that gun control itself would not completely put spree killing to a halt but it would have a reasonable and noticeable effect.

Actually, I’m not so sure. I don’t really know if modest gun control, the type which may pass in the current US climate, would have much of an effect on spree killing at all. Spree killing, even in the US where there is a ridiculous amount of it, is a relatively small percentage of gun violence.

As far as I’m concerned, the greater horror is the untold numbers of ones and twos, of people killed in domestic violence and in accidental deaths and suicides and in random everyday gun stupidity, the sort of which happens when you have a lot of humans who think guns are cool and who have a lot of guns close at hand. After all, it has been one month since Newtown. And horrible as the mass murder of 20 first graders is, a lot more than 20 kids have died in the very short month since. That’s the real horror in the US - the endless gun deaths that the public absolutely does not give a shit about, because they’re so common that they just don’t make a dent.