As a shooting spree leaves seven dead in California, the gun lobby is trying to thwart attempts to study gun deaths and officials who see gun violence as a public health crisis.
Yet another massacre occurred last night at an institution of learning, this time the University of California, Santa Barbara. The price we paid for the National Rifle Association’s “freedom” was seven people murdered and seven injured at nine different crime scenes.
A young man who Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown called “severely mentally disturbed,” drove by various student hangouts to commit an act of "premeditated mass murder" apparently—according to videos posted to Youtube and threats made to women on campus—due to his anger at being “rejected” by women on campus.
Of course, this is all too familiar: a young aggrieved male, mentally disturbed, threatening others—especially women—but still able to get his hands on a high capacity magazine of the variety used in so many other mass murders. This doesn't happen in any other high income country with the regularity it does here; in fact, it almost never happens in any of them.
Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, has said it is “surprised and...
