Without Baseline Gun Control In The Public Interest, More Aurora/Oak Creek Massacres Are Inevitable

I posted this over at my Purple Wisconsin blog:

After the slaughter at the Aurora, CO movie theater a few weeks ago, I had this to say on my personal blog:

...the Aurora shootings come but five years after a higher death toll in a mass shooting at Virginia Tech, and Colorado did not toughen its gun laws after the Columbine school killings not far from Aurora.

Few political figures in either party will take on the NRA. We've got bi-partisan political cowardice, and the result is gun access for lunatics.

We need a mass movement along the lines of Occupy Wall Street to get things started towards reasonable controls on gun ownership, or we're only closing in on the next Aurora, let alone the less-publicized daily gun mayhem happening across the country.

And we will face these same horrific consequences again and again, as well as the less-publicized intentional shootings, gun suicides and accidental killings in the home by curious children or careless adults unless and until we decide that enough is enough - - that if you can't cry "fire" in a crowded theater, your right to living through a movie or a religious service should trump on behalf the society at large someone else's right to own and carry a weapon meant for the battlefield.

We have allowed a well-financed NRA and their partners in the arms industry to lobby and propagandize and bully legislators and courts into believing that the 2nd Amendment written in the 18th century, when the country needed protection from foreign military attack, should mean that just about anyone can acquire military-grade firepower that can be turned against theater-goers, religious worshippers, or someone in a playground fight or road rage scenario.

I'm not against deer hunting, and I'm not saying that people who can prove a legitimate need for self-protection on the job should be barred from obtaining a handgun.

But the rest of it should be left to trained, sworn police officers - - individuals who should also not be placed in harm's way as were the Oak Creek police and fellow brave public servants by the proliferation of guns in our midst.

The Journal Sentinel today is arguing for restrictions on the capacity of ammunition clips.

That's a starting place for the discussion, but if we don't get to at least a reinstitution of the restrictions on assault weapons, and we don't confront the enabling of widespread semi-automatic handgun possession, we can look down the road and see more mass killings with these weapons.