Prayers "Just Won't Do"

[emilyg]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021708F.shtml

Prayers" Just Won't Do
By Tim Rutten
The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 16 February 2008

It's been a particularly grim and bloody month on one of the world's great killing fields - the United States of America.

On Friday, Los Angeles paused for the largest police funeral in its history when it buried Officer Randal Simmons, a 51-year-old father of two and the LAPD's first SWAT team member to die in the line of duty. Simmons was shot dead and Officer James Veenstra was badly wounded when they - along with others in their unit - rushed into a San Fernando Valley home where a disturbed young man had killed three members of his family and was believed to be holding others hostage.

In Oxnard this week, an eighth-grader walked into a clas sroom and fatally shot a classmate in the head, apparently because the boy was gay.

On Thursday, at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student walked into a lecture hall, shot five students to death and wounded 16 other people before committing suicide.

There have been three other campus shootings since Feb. 8, including one at Louisiana Technical College, where a woman shot two students to death before killing herself.

Earlier in the month, a gunman in Kirkwood, Mo., burst into a City Council meeting, killed five people and wounded the town's

[undeterred]

1. But we mustn't question gun policy.