As we all know by now, last week the U.S. Senate, in spectacular, lily-livered fashion, caved to the NRA, voting down even the weakest, most watered down version of a gun control bill. After the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, which so many people claimed “changed everything”, nothing, in fact, has changed at all. Forget an assault weapons ban, forget bans on high capacity magazines; we can’t even ask gun buyers to submit to a simple background check at a gun show. And, since, according to Mother Jones, “around 40% of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don’t require background checks” that’s a lot of buyers and a lot of guns. Continue reading →