newtown

After getting the news yesterday I was too sad and upset to write anything.

Obama was obliged to speak, and managed to hold it together and make sense.

"Whether it's an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago – these neighbourhoods are our neighbourhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics," he said.

For "meaningful action," I'd suggest we re-instate the semiautomatic weapons/assault weapons ban we had in place between 1994 and 2004, when Bush and his Repuglican Congress sunsetted it.

There were muckers doing shootings in those years, but loss of life was a lot less. During that 10-year span there were two mass shootings: Columbine and the mucker day-trader in Atlanta who killed nine at a brokerage house. Both in 1999.

After the ban was lifted there was a mass shooting at a church in Wisconsin in 2005 (six dead), the Amish school mass murder of 2006, where the shooter let the adults and boys go, then shot the 10 little girls left in the school, killing six.

Virginia Tech was in 2007. Then we got lucky in a macabre way, because nobody was killed except the shooter at Northern Illinois University in 2008 -- eighteen wounded. Followed by three such assaults on crowds in 2009, two big ones in 2010, then three last year and four this year -- so far. See the timeline.

We're collectively crazy if we don't take pro-active steps to get a handle on the proliferation of heavy artillery in this country. Trouble is, I'm afraid we are crazy, every bit as nutsoid as we appear to people in foreign lands.

Also, what would it take for people to have more and better access to mental health services?