You want to see something I hate? I hate this chart.

The latest in the largely American phenomenon of school shootings took place in Alpine, Texas, on Thursday. The only fatality was the shooter herself. (One student was wounded, but not severely, at least according to the earliest reports. A local police officer was wounded by a marshal in the confusion at the beginning of the incident.) The rest of the story runs to form: schools on lockdown, places where parents can pick up their children, befuddlement at how anything like that could happen Here. I understand all of that. What I hate is that there have been enough of these to create a template with which to cover them.

And I hate that damn chart. I'll just leave this here for the inevitable arrival of the gun-fondling crowd that shows up every time there's one of these inconvenient exercises of Second Amendment freedoms, the people who love to argue—only in the abstract, of course—that the chart is an accounting of the price we pay to be a free people.

I hate that argument. I hate that chart.

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Anyway, here's President Lyndon Johnson, the lamest lame duck of all in October of 1968, announcing the passage of a gun-control bill that he managed through the Congress in the wake of the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin King. The guy sounds weary unto death, but there's something formidable there, surviving.

Some of you may be interested in knowing—really—what this bill does: --It stops murder by mail order. It bars the interstate sale of all guns and the bullets that load them. --It stops the sale of lethal weapons to those too young to bear their terrible responsibility.--It puts up a big "off-limits" sign, to stop gunrunners from dumping cheap foreign "$10 specials" on the shores of our country. Congress adopted most of our recommendations.

But this bill—as big as this bill is—still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country—more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the criminal and out of the hands of the insane and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.

He would have hated that chart, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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