UPDATE: numbah gets a helpful vote from me (learn from that, you cowardly unhelpfuls!) for the information about laws regulating automatics. Yet we know that the Glock used by Cho to kill 32 people fired 5 rounds a second. At that rate, the difference between "automatic" and "semi" is semantic. The gun freaks still don't have anything to say beyond their pitifully circular assertions about the power of guns. Let's just get out a tape measure and get this shit over with.

I've taught writing for ten years, having seen many students turn in assignments as freaky as Cho's. The difference: they didn't have GUNS. QED.

***

After the horrors of yesterday's shootings, it is time for us to reconsider our stance on this subject.

The gun-rights lobby will tell you that they don't want to make a principle like the Second Amendment subject to the whims of any nutjob who decides to kill 32 people, but the fact is that this is the only time we as a nation get to put aside the insane insistence on absolute rights, and talk about this issue in a reasonable manner.

The gun-rights lobby will characterize this is a "tragedy," but the fact is that this is not a tragedy because there is nothing inevitable about giving the evil people of the world access to deadly weapons (as the pro-war Republicans, of all people, should know).

The gun-rights lobby will tell you that armed students would have prevented yesterday's horrors, but the fact is that we will never have a nation in which gun ownership is universal. I would agree with them that universal gun ownership might be a good thing in a republic, reducing the mystique of guns, but we will never get to create such a society because it requires the right of revolution to be exercised frequently against the government which should not have a monopoly on deadly force. In the meantime, allowing open access to arms can only produce a world where more and more evil people will lethalize their evil.

This is not the last time this will happen -- it can only get worse.

We need provisional solutions, not more garbage talk about absolute rights or hopes for a return to the supposedly utopian days of the early American republic. We need long waiting periods for weapons, more background checks, more restrictions on semiautomatics. My parents-in-law can't get through airport security without being stripped bare because some idiotic bureaucrat at Homeland Security flagged them for declaring bankruptcy, yet they can buy assault weapons to kill dozens of people if it takes their fancy.

I can only hope that Bush will back down and be willing to work out compromises with congressional action on the issue. From today's NYT: "President Bush's press secretary relayed his first comments on the subject, saying that he 'believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.' That was after he expressed 'deep concern for the families of the victims, the victims themselves, the students, the professors and all the people of Virginia who have dealt with this shocking incident.'" He has thrown down the political gauntlet, and so maybe there will be a renewal of the assault-weapons ban that he allowed to expire.

(I know, I know, don't tell me that the shooter didn't have an assault weapon, just a semiautomatic weapon. My response to you is: Can you imagine the devastation if he had?)

I can only hope.