Ft. Hood shooting is part of the scenery in a gun-crazy nation
In response to Wednesday’s mass shooting at Ft. Hood, Speaker of the House John A. Boehner said mentally disturbed people should not be allowed to get their hands on firearms. But don’t hold your breath waiting for legislation to emerge from Congress that would keep that from happening.
"There’s no question that those with mental health issues should be prevented from owning weapons or being able to purchase weapons." That is what Boehner said. Yet, last year, when a bipartisan bill to set up a system of background checks for gun purchases was put forward, Boehner showed no enthusiasm for bringing it up for a vote in the House. (As it turned out, the bill fell four votes short of evading a filibuster in the Senate, so the speaker found it easy to do nothing.)
So, what do Boehner’s words really mean? Was he just expressing a sympathetic-sounding abstraction at a moment of tragedy? Apparently so, because the only legislation he talked about in his comments was a recently passed Medicare reimbursement bill that included funding for a pilot program to study the link between mental illness and gun violence.
A study? What is it exactly that we need to know? We already have real-life test cases from places such as Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Tucson that have shown the horrors that can happen when sick-minded men get their hands on guns. And now we have another test case from Ft. Hood, where a disturbed soldier went on a shooting spree, killing three people and wounding 16 before he shot himself.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-fort-hood-shooting-20140404,0,34520.story
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