When is this madness going to end?

When will the callous cowards in Congress begin to recognize that some of the blood spilled during the increasing number of mass shootings in this country is, to some extent, the result of the blood money they accept from the NRA. When will this madness end?

It has been said that one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. Charleston, Chattanooga, Lafayette have become the seemingly endless list of communities having to deal with what has become the new normal in an environment of unlimited access to guns - a condition fiercely defended by the NRA and gutless representatives who, on "principle", vote against any restrictions that could sensibly control that situation. Between 2000 and 2010 335,609 people died from guns in the United States. Every 17 minutes a person is killed by a firearm - 87 people on an average day. Those are the statistics, and these obviously don't even include the time period since 2010. Mass killings appear to have become increasingly prominent. In addition to the above, consider Sandy Hook, Isla Vista, Aurora, to add just a few. I suppose Lafayette does not meet the statistical measurement of being considered a  "mass killing", since according to a 2013 law we define those calamities as killings

 of three or more people. Shooters are not included in the stastistic.

After each one of these massacres politicians become active, passing laws protecting their standing with the gun lobby, and suggesting that if only more people would have had guns, these massacres would have been curtailed. Iowa, some time ago, passed a law stipulating that blind people can buy guns and carry them in public. Several municipalities even mandated their populations to own guns. Loaded guns are now allowed in bars in Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Virgiunia and Ohio. People bring their guns to school, church and social settings. After all, our Second Amendment - a relic of the distant past -supposedly allows us to own, carry, and do whatever we need to keep our guns. In the entire civilized world only Mexico and Guatemala have adopted similar provisions in their constitution. We don't have to want to eliminate the irrational stranglehold of the gun lobby on our lives. We can simply want to eliminate loopholes and establish rational restrictions on gun ownership. We are not just considering the 32,000 annual gun deaths in this country. Every time someone dies an entire support group suffers as well. What multiplier should we use to assess the real impact of each of these killings? Five, ten, fifteen? At what point are these numbers simply relegated to becoming statistics? When will we acknowledge that we are talking about real people?

The fanatics love to say: "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns";  or "guns don't kill people, people kill people." These idiotic , circular, "arguments" may work on bumper stickers. They make no sense. People with guns kill people, and as far as the "outlaw" reference goes, I have a magnet on my refrigerator that states: "When lutefisk is outlawed only outlaws will have lutefisk." Tautological, circular, and not very helpful to the conversation.

It is very frustrating to continually ponder how we can frame the argument for sensible gun control and the closing of loopholes. The statistics continue to pile up. Perhaps we should consider letting our our representatives know that if they can't muster the courage to sensibly confront the issue, they are, in effect, facilitating these ubiquitous killings. Too harsh? Perhaps. However, we need to force the issue somehow.