More gun violence at a high school in Colorado.

Déjà vu all over again. Another incident involving guns just occurred at a school in Colorado not far from Columbine High School, and not too far from where I grew up.

I haven’t noticed anyone even mention this country’s policy of absurdly easy access to guns in the aftermath of another horrendously chilling event. However, given the circumstances of this one, I doubt anything would have deterred this guy short of removing every single privately held firearm in the country. And that is not going to happen, I freely acknowledge that. I’m not even advocating an extreme position like that. I think this last week’s episode is probably more about a psychopath and sexual deviant on the rampage than it is about guns.

However, I will rail a bit here about how utterly indifferent this country has become to violence done to innocent people, including 16 year old girls, with guns. Yes, we will all feel terribly about what happened, and feel for the parents of a young girl who went to school one day and won’t ever be coming home. We will make noises about needing to do something about the security in schools. Shall we put in more metal detectors, or more visible police? Or maybe both? But we will not have a discussion about the access to deadly weapons by people who should not be trusted with a letter opener, much less loaded weapons. No, our civil liberties are “much too precious” to ever think about restricting access to guns. However, we seem to have no problem whatsoever with the loss of all the rest of our liberties, such as habeas corpus, freedom to dissent, separation of church and state and freedom of the press. Just so long as the person responsible for taking away those liberties is a Christian and is “protecting our country”, then people seem to have no problem with that.

I’m sorry, but I cannot reconcile all these contradictory positions that the right wing has these days. I know that I feel terribly for the 16 year old girl who lost her life the other day, as well as for her family and friends and all the other kids in that school who were terrorized by that evil person. Would things have turned out any differently if there had been stricter gun control laws? Most likely not. But maybe there is something that could be done to prevent the next lunatic with a grievance and a semi-automatic. I just seriously doubt that this country is willing to have that discussion. We are much too involved in the important stuff, like making sure that no gay persons can marry each other.

UPDATE: A student in Wisconsin just killed his principle because the principle disciplined him for having tabacco. The kid got the guns by breaking open his family's locked gun storage.