Legal WMD that we love and die to keep

Focusing on mental health or our "culture" in an attempt to stop more shooting rampages is a red herring meant to distract us. (And if you want to give all America's mentally ill proper medical care -- support Obamacare or shut up about it.)  Writes WaPo's Caputo:

Since the Newtown, Conn., massacre, there has been a good deal of vague chatter suggesting that people like Purdy or Lanza or Jared Loughner can be identified before they act on their monstrous fantasies and can be prohibited from purchasing firearms. A kind of early-warning radar will detect a disturbed personality on a trajectory toward slaughter.

How would this be accomplished? Are disgruntled workers, loners or anyone who says or does bizarre things going to be examined by psychiatric boards? If it’s determined that they are potential dangers to themselves or others, would they be placed on some sort of national watch list? Compelled to undergo treatment? Locked up?

Even if such a system had been in place, it would not have stopped Lanza, who, as we all know, obtained his weapons by stealing them from the collection of his gun-enthusiast mother.

Again, it comes back to the guns themselves. And no, more guns or armed security guards in our 100,000 schools (as the NRA lamely suggests) are not the answer: recall that an armed security guard traded shots with Klebold and Harris before they shot and killed 13 people and shot and wounded 24 others at Columbine High School in 1999. The school security guard's main safety contribution that day was calling in local police. 

But what’s more wrong are the guns themselves. A 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with a 30-round clip isn’t a pistol; it’s a weapon of mass destruction. Jared Loughner proved that by killing six people and wounding 13 others in not much more time than it took you to read this sentence.

Today, tens of millions of such firearms are in circulation in the United States. If it were up to me, they would be regulated as strictly as fully automatic weapons, such as machine guns, have been for decades. All citizens, except those with federal firearms licenses, would be required to surrender them to law enforcement authorities (with fair compensation). And then I’d destroy them.

But sensible gun buy-back like what happened in Australia won't ever be attempted in the U.S. Why? It's our dirty little open secret. We all know that the backwards Red States would be in uproar, especially the South. There would be individual and organized acts of terrorism. Officially, some states might seek to secede.  And all this to defend the right of Americans to commit the equivalent of three September 11th attacks against each other every year!

Blame the killing machines: guns

By Philip Caputo

December 21, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/WCkP5r