>This is an opportunity for an attack on gun capital, just as Clinton has
>fought a sustained battle against tobacco capital.
>
>Or would this just be another liberal wank, Doug?
Whatever it is (I've learned nothing of this from three years here in cyber-lefty label-land), this is how it panned out in Oz. After the Port Arthur massacre of two (?) years back, our spectacularly socially conservative (and hideously economically radical) prime-minister was able to pass nation-wide gun laws pretty quickly (they're slowly being watered down as I write, but this highlights the importance of working quickly if you want to get anything good out of this tragedy at all).
I'm generally confused about the pros and cons of gun control, and how it's done, but I know you can't have a country full of mid-teenage blokes (who, as if I could forget, are often full of emotional upheavals, moments of fear and loathing, bouts of narcisistic self-alienation, and serial romantic disasters) running around with automatic rifles!
The US anti-gun lobby now has at least 25 young, presentable, middle-class martyrs available to it. Even by US standards, this is a salient moment in the history of pedagogical gore. In a culture so obsessed with child-molesting, the association of gun capital with child-murder (pedacide?) should make for a hard-hitting campaign, eh?
Or if you can't do that, at least point out to someone somewhere that this tragedy gets played out in similar magnitudes under NATO bombs on a nightly basis (it is, it seems, no use at all talking about Iraqis).
Rob.