Madmen And Madmen

There are the madmen who kill with bullets, and there are the madmen who kill with words. Today the nation (and certainly countless bewildered people around the world) heard an insane message from one of the latter kind. Wayne Lapierre, the unhinged leader of the National Rifle Association, followed up on his promise of a meaningful press conference with a rant that maintained his fierce rejection of any kind of gun control and that called for posting armed guards in all of America's schools. (Costing billions of dollars to do what? There were armed guards at Columbine.)

Two questions:

Why doesn't the membership (70 percent of which believes in some gun control) run Lapierre off?

Why is he being paid $1,000,000 a year to engender universal fear and threaten elected officials with primary defeat if they so much as lean toward restoring the ban on assault weapons? (Answer: he is the goose that lays a thousand golden eggs for the arms industry.)

But now there is realistic hope -- if the great majority of Americans does not let the memory of the Newtown massacre fade and if President Obama holds firm. It will take a long time to reverse our country's unique culture of violence, but reversing the influence of Lapierre and his henchmen would be a wonderful start.