Congress Was Gunman's Accomplice: Opinion

It's not just Republicans who go off the deep end on this subject. "If there were no assault weapons available and no this or no that, this guy is going find something, right?" said Colorado's Democratic governor John Hickenlooper. "He's going to know how to create a bomb."

Sure, he could "create a bomb" or buy a baseball bat and roam the streets of Aurora, bashing people with it. But since that's messy, doesn't it make a lot more sense for us to just give up and make it easy for him to slaughter people en masse?

That's the kind of swill that used to come out of only the looniest anti-gun-control automatons. But now it's gone mainstream.

The word out of the White House is not encouraging. So far, it seems that President Obama is going to put getting re-elected over the lives of the American people.

A White House spokesman says, "The president is focused on doing the things that we can do that protect Second Amendment rights, which he thinks is important, but also make it harder for individuals who should not under existing law have weapons to obtain them." But the president, he said, is not pushing for reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.

So I guess we're just on our own, just as the Earp brothers were in Tombstone in 1882, when they enlisted Doc Holliday to enforce Tombstone's municipal gun control law at the OK Corral.

There is a culture of violence in this country; we saw its manifestations in Tombstone in 1882 and again on Friday morning in Aurora, Colo.

We call ourselves the greatest nation on earth. But we have to accept that along with that greatness comes an annoying tendency of our people to shoot each other. Our leaders need to recognize that, or share the responsibility for continued bloodshed.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.

Gary Weiss's most recent book is AYN RAND NATION: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, published by St. Martin's Press.

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