>>> card from capital one and earn unlimited rewards. choose 2% cash back or double miles on every purchase every day. told you i'd get half. months ago. the one we paid a great deal of attention to, the newtown shootings. the cycle is the same, something horrible happens, we all watch it happen in realtime and feel terrible and want to know who were the perpetrators, what are the circumstances, and why did it happen. we get some inkling and have a discussion of what the implications are for policy, what we might do to prevent something from this happening again in the future. when it's guns, when the killer is a shooter, the answer is nothing. we are told this just happens. but if it gets put in a special category called terrorism, then the answer is, everything must be done, no cost should be spared, no legal precedent should stand in the way. once it gets put in the terrorism bucket, we must do everything in our power. no one ever says people are going to die from terrorism, that's just the way it is. and if it's in the gun bucket, yeah, 30,000 people are going to die every year from guns. that's just the way it is. why is that the case? in the last 30 years, there have been 30,000 to 40,000 gun deaths in the united states per year, more than 900,000 people. in the last 40 years since 1970 , there have been about 3,400 terror-related deaths, depending how you define terror according to the integrated united states security data base . a million gun fatalities in the 33 years since 1980 versus 3,400 terror fatalities since 1970 , 43 years. there's a reason why terrorism has a significance and justifiably so, it's the ideological political violence does a sort of violence to the social contract itself that is distinct, menacing, horrible, it distorts society in a specific and special way, a way that a very deranged murderous kid in a school with a gun doesn't. the terrorist act , the perpetrator removes himself to resolve ideological disputes in a nonviolent fashion. but the scale of mismatch between how our political system responds to one kind of death versus the other is shocking, particularly on a day when we're watching this gun bill go down in flames. in a seemingly unrelated homeland security hearing today, senator claire mccaskill raised an incredibly intriguing question.

>> based on the evidence at this point, is there any difference between sandy hook and boston other than the choice of weapon?

>> the answer, which homeland security secretary janet napolitano conceded is no. underlying the according tos used by opponents of gun safety issues is the implied position that 30,000 people are going to die each year by guns and that's the way it has to be. it's the price of freedom. and it is absolutely true that some number of horrible events is, in fact, the price of freedom. you cannot have total security without the country becoming a police state . we expose ourselves to risk by getting out of the house in the morning, getting in a car, going into a public space , through there is a bizarre and perverse mismatch in our political culture about what risks are acceptable and what are not, depending on what the implement of violence is or what the origin of the perpetrator is. so, today, the manchin/toomey background check amendment, the gun bill, the watered down compromise failed to pass the senate's agreed upon filibuster of 60. keep in mind, it got 54 votes, four more allowed than if it was an actual up or down vote. it was fill bustered.

>> the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill, and unfortunately this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose, because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners and that, in turn, intimidated a lot of senators. i heard some say that blocking this step would be a victory. and my question is, a victory for who? a victory for what? victory for not doing something that 90% of americans, 80% of republicans, the vast majority of your constituents wanted to get done? it begs the question, who are we here to represent? so, all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for washington.

>> opponents lied saying this bill created a gun registry when it did exactly the opposite, created a 15-year prison sentence for anyone creating a gun registry . so, as we follow the developments out of boston , as we leave no stone unturned attempting to find the perpetrator, another 88 or so people will lose their life to a bullet tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. meanwhile, we'll all worry that if the suspect who blew up the finish line in boston isn't caught, we can't be