The New York Times has a photo of a billboard in the Arizona county where so many were wounded and killed. It announces the gun show coming up this weekend, "13 miles from the site of the shootings." Sales are already up in gun dealerships around Tucson. The beat goes on.
An even bigger event in Las Vegas, the Shot Show — which bills itself as the country’s largest exhibition of guns and ammunition — is proceeding next week with a four-day run that fills two floors of convention space.
According to the Times, the NRA has remained silent but not mute. There are hopes for a cultural change but not expectations. Members of Congress are hardly role models.
Many members of Congress own firearms, which they carry while riding around in farm trucks in their district or concealed behind a jacket in the streets, among constituents.
The weaker you feel as a person, the more likely you are to carry a gun.
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Paul Krugman confronts the larger problem of what's happening to our society, but he could well be talking about the gun culture.
... The truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
