Gotcha Morning | The Gun Control Non-Debate

Just as President Obama and Mitt Romney put politics on hold last week, the Sunday morning political talk shows tried their best to be apolitical in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado shooting. But inevitably, the coverage led to discussions about guns and what, if anything, government should be doing to prevent more massacres like this one. Mayor Bloomberg continued his call for the presidential candidates to express their views on gun control and Bill Kristol gave some unexpected advice to President Obama. But for the most part, when both Democrats and Republicans were faced with the question about the future of gun control in America, the consensus was that there's little to be done.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who appeared on three Sunday morning shows, repeated three times that he anticipated a revived debate about gun control but predicted that nothing significant would change in Colorado or nationally. In the clip below from Meet The Press, Hicklooper makes the point that if the shooter didn't have access to guns, he would have found another way to kill.

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This same argument, which steers the debate away from guns and towards a purely psychological view of mass shootings was repeated throughout the morning by politicians. Senator John McCain pointed to Norway, which has much stronger gun laws than the U.S. but still had one large gun massacre one year ago yesterday.

On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson essentially ganged up on California Senator Dianne Feinstein, perpetuating the severely misguided theory first launched by Rep. Louie Gohmert that more guns in the theater could have meant less deaths.

From everything we know of this horrific incident, the killer bought his guns legally and if Congress hadn't let the Assault Weapons ban expire he would have had a lot more trouble purchasing the deadliest of those guns. Our law enforcement system in this country is set up to catch criminals, but until he walked into that theater, James Holmes was just a regular guy who owned enough guns and ammunition to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.

It's easy to say that if he couldn't have gotten as those guns, he would have used other means. But this killer and countless before him chose guns because they are far too available and far too efficient. If yesterday's political "debate" on gun control is the best we can do, then we as a country are not trying hard enough to stop the next one of these gun massacres from happening.