Guns are still the problem

There was a weird phenomenon that played out Wednesday evening, as most of the country watched the news coverage of yet another mass shooting in America.

With tidbits of info trickling in from San Bernardino, where two gunmen killed 14 people at a county health department Christmas party, it became clear that two distinct “sides” had formed among the American public.

Conservatives and liberals seemed to be pulling for specific outcomes.

Conservatives wanted the shooters to be Islamic terrorists hellbent on destroying America.

Liberals wanted the shooters to be conservative Americans using guns purchased through a gun show loophole.

This is what the gun debate in America has become – two sides arguing over talking points and overblown scenarios. This sort of mindless, if-that-then-this argument is one of the biggest threats to American safety. It is a mindset based on a simplistic world view and one that often leads to inaction.

Protecting the country from terrorists AND implementing reasonable gun laws are not mutually exclusive ideals.

We have taken gigantic leaps forward in our efforts to combat terrorism in this country through our information gathering and intelligence networks in the years since 9/11. We have spent billions of dollars in this fight against international terrorism.

And the proof of its success lies in the absence of attacks and the foiling of other plots before they develop.

At the same time, the country has done almost nothing about a gun culture that is out of control.

We have more than 300 million guns in this country. But scarier than that, we also have this strange belief that simple gun ownership makes a person safer. And in some cases, there seems to be a belief that gun ownership turns a person into some lethal mix of Jack Bauer and Chuck Norris.

If that wasn’t bad enough, over the years, the NRA has been so successful at lobbying Congress, a number of gun regulations have been steadily struck down. Even under “gun-grabbing” Obama, there has been an overall decrease in gun regulations nationally, and he has yet to grab a single gun from anyone.

And of course, any attempt to strengthen laws and regulations is assigned the label of “gun control.” Somehow, confiscating all guns and background checks are classified the same.

It’s all “gun control.”

Except none of it is controlling anything.

The two people responsible for Wednesday’s rampage in California purchased their guns legally and stockpiled more than 5,000 rounds of ammo without raising a red flag anywhere. The next time you hand over your ID to buy a box of sinus medicine, let the absurdity wash over you.

Last year, more than 40 percent of all gun sales in America were made without a background check, because those sales occurred privately, usually online.

Somehow, the private transfer of gun ownership doesn’t require a background check for the purchaser or a notice of the sale.

You have to provide a notice for the sale of a car or a house or certain livestock or animals, like a monkey. But then, a monkey in the wrong hands can be dangerous, I guess.

To highlight the idiocy of it all, on Thursday, Republicans in the Senate voted down a number of proposals that would have prevented terrorists, felons and the mentally ill from purchasing guns.

To be clear: this means that people on the terrorist no-fly list can continue to purchase firearms legally, but they are still considered too dangerous to board an airplane.

I don’t know why I’m pretending that any of this is surprising, though.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched news coverage of students at colleges on both sides of the country being gunned down while just going to class. There were 20 kindergartners killed in a Connecticut elementary school. Nine people were killed during a service inside a Charleston, S.C., church. Some guy shot and killed a TV news reporter and her cameraman while they were on the air, recorded himself doing it and put the video on social media.

Not one law has been passed by Congress in response.

If I told you that ISIS had shot more than 50 people in America this year, you’d freak out and we’d spend a trillion dollars getting ISIS the hell out of here.

But ISIS didn’t shoot those people. Toddlers did. Because we have so many guns laying around, American toddlers can do that.

Honestly, what are we doing here?