The Gun Control "Debate"

Here's what the "debate" over guns boils down to, summarized quite nicely in two paragraphs from the New York Times in its initial coverage of recent shooting in Aurora, Colorado:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who has waged a national campaign for stricter gun laws, offered a political challenge. “Maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly radio program, “because this is obviously a problem across the country.”Luke O’Dell of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a Colorado group on the other side of the debate over gun control, took a nearly opposite view. “Potentially, if there had been a law-abiding citizen who had been able to carry in the theater, it’s possible the death toll would have been less.

The Rocky Mountain Gun Club's website goes even further. It says, "the blatant attempt by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to use the blood of these innocents to advance his radical political agenda is disgusting. Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign succeeded in disarming not just these movie-goers, but has created millions of gun-free criminal-safezones across the county.”
The "no-compromise gun rights" people like O'Dell believe that more shooting will save lives. He figures that some Coolhand Luke (probably like O'Dell, himself, in his fantasy) would have stood up and calmly put one bullet into the brain of the fully-armored shooter in the movie theater, and then we all would have been safer.

That "radical", Bloomberg, on the other hand (don't you wonder whether O'Dell has any idea who Bloomberg is?), thinks that crossfire is dangerous. He thinks that maybe some cowboy firing back at the original shooter might have done harm.

This is not a debate. It's a bunch of  maniacs shouting while rational people talk.