"The Gun Epidemic"

The New York Times publishes its first front page editorial in nearly 100 years, and it's about gun violence in America and those who foster it.  Here's an excerpt:

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.  (our emphasis)

Let's pause to note that those "elected leaders... who place a higher premium" on campaign donations and stoking voter turnout than our safety are, with a few grotesque exceptions, Republicans.  Let's also pause to note the "industry dedicated to profiting" from the carnage is not about hunters, sportsmen or collectors - it's about the gun manufacturing industry and their spokestoadies, the National Rifle Gun Manufacturers Association.

Unfortunately, politicians who want to take on the gun terrorist lobby are seeing the effects of a decades- long campaign of lies and distortions ("the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun", ergo buy a gun!) by the gun terrorist lobby and their Republican stooges that's making their task more difficult than ever:

About half [52%] of all Americans oppose stricter gun control laws, a larger segment of the population than those who support tighter controls on guns, according to a new CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday.  (our emphasis)

Let's note that poll was taken three weeks after the mass shootings in Roseburg, Oregon, in October that left 9 people dead.  The epidemic is on us and it's spreading because, instead of tackling the problem head on, a majority of us are coming up with the wrong answers.