After These Deadly Hate Attacks, Why Aren't We Talking About Guns?
We talk about violence committed in the name of bigotry or religion. But what about the deadly firepower available to the killers?
Bill Moyers, AlterNet
You know by now that in Washington, DC, on Wednesday (June 10), an elderly white supremacist and anti-Semite named James W. von Brunn allegedly walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a .22-caliber rifle and killed security guard Stephen T. Johns before being brought down himself. He's 88 years old, with a long record of hatred and paranoid fantasies about the Illuminati and a Global Zionist state. How bitter the bile that has curdled for so many decades.
You will know, too, of the recent killing, while ushering at his local church, of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country still performing late term abortions. Sadly, this case was proof that fatal violence works. His family has announced that his Wichita, Kansas, clinic will not be reopened.
Related:
Gun (In)Sanity, Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
The Columbine killings were committed using two shotguns, an assault rifle, and a TEC-9 assault pistol -- all purchased from gun shows and three by a person who later said she wouldn't have done so if a background check had been required.
