I'm as big a supporter of the Second Amendment right to bear arms as I am of the First Amendment right to free speech. I've said so before.
You can't make exceptions to one constitutionally guaranteed right without endangering all the others. Selective failure to safeguard one amendment makes it harder to defend the rest.
Therefore, I want to defend the right to bear arms and a wide interpretation of that right. I'm having a very hard time doing that because I don't have any data -- the ammunition you need for this type of fight.
It's past time for Second Amendment supporters to admit the 1996 ban on funding research on gun deaths was a serious mistake. Without research -- even bad research that can be rebutted -- a debate on guns becomes purely emotional. You will ultimately lose an emotional argument when the other side has dead students and church-goers on its side.
Congress forbade the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding public health research into firearms. No one has taken up the slack since. If gun devotees don't want to be stigmatized by having these deaths tracked like a disease, fine. Give the money to do this research to some other entity. Create one if you have to. But somebody somewhere needs to track this.
After the latest mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon -- and after all the earlier ones and after all the ones that will come -- people calling for gun control can legitimately ask how many people have to die before something's done.
We're going to get to a a tipping point someday. If we haven't found a way to effectively and constitutionally stop these shootings by then, we're going watch while something's done that's unconstitutional and ineffective.
What do I expect research to find? Answers to questions like the one I asked in 2012, after school kids were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary. Would a good sheet steel door rather than a glass one that shattered when shot have stopped this?
In that same column, I quoted Jack Levin, a sociology and criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of a book on extreme violence. He contributed an article to the Boston Globe in which he said these murderers copycat each other. My inference from that is if we find the way to stop one, we stop several. Likewise, find a way to limit the "success" of one, and the would-be copycats will be less impressed.
We can't find such ways to stop these shooters if we don't look.
Speaking of "all or nothing" themes, the most important election campaign in the country got off to a very bad start on Thursday.
Forget the presidential primary race. Who's elected president someday matters little if Congress remains a train wreck. Getting Congress up onto the rails depends on the Republicans because the Republicans control the House. The Democrats have no real-world chance of changing that in 2016.
Therefore, the nation is in the highly unenviable position of needing House Republicans to get their act together. Thursday, we saw that the GOP can't even elect a House Speaker.
That Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., dropped out doesn't bother me. He wasn't up to the job. What bothers me is the lack of anybody who is. The last politician I heard of with the skills and ruthlessness needed would be Lyndon Baines Johnson. Unfortunately, he was a Democrat. And he's dead.
If I had to bet, I'd bet Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., will find it increasingly difficult to resist pleas to pull his party's fat out of the fire. In the meantime, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, will stay -- freed by his sincere effort to leave. Now he can make deals with Democrats and tell his right-wingers, "What are you going to do? Fire me?" He may well be a more effective speaker as a dead duck than before.
Don't expect Democrats to support a reasonable Republican and put the good of the country first. All the reasonable Democrats lost or left between 2010 and 2014.
The bombastically self-titled "Freedom Caucus" in the House thinks it needs to stand firm and reject compromise. That's false hope. "Hope" and "Change" won't work for Republicans either.
No messiah will descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of the archangel, freeing the faithful from the need to make deals with the devil -- whichever side you think the devil may be.
Commentary on 10/10/2015