Abbreviated pundit round-up: Renewing the debate over gun control

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Stephen Foley on America and guns: when will they learn?

[New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg] has been a consistent advocate of reform, but he is a billionaire, insulated from the need to raise money for his runs for office.

Other politicians are increasingly wary of weighing in in favour of anything that might circumscribe the Second Amendment right to bear arms, in the face of the National Rifle Association's massive lobbying firepower. The American public narrowly, but definitively, tells pollsters it favours gun rights over new restrictions. Gun control advocates are on the back foot almost everywhere in the US.

Kevin Drum offers A Quick Peek Inside the Latest From the Nutball Right:

Elsewhere, Steven Taylor passes along the news that certified nutcase Alex Jones doesn't believe the mass shooting in Aurora was the act of a demented maniac, but was "planned by the Obama administration (along with Fast and Furious and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting) as a plot to let the UN take our guns away." Perhaps Jones will ask Ron Paul what he thinks of that the next time he appears on the show.

E.J. Dionne on The Colorado shooting and the gag rule on guns:

Normally, we engage in a searching conversation over what rational steps can be taken by individuals, communities and various levels of government to make the recurrence of a comparable tragedy less likely. Sometimes we act, sometimes we don't, but at least we explore sensible solutions.

Unless the tragedy involves guns. Then our whole public reasoning process goes haywire. Anyone who dares to say that an event such as the massacre at a Colorado movie theater early Friday demands that we rethink our approach to the regulation of firearms is accused of 'exploiting' the deaths of innocent people.

Paul Whitefield asks How about a No More Assault Rifles Act of 2012?

Washington Times Editorial Board says Batman won't save you. But a concealed weapon might:

There was no return fire at the theater in Aurora because apparently no one other than the shooter was armed. While Colorado has good concealed-carry laws, Cinemark cinemas don't allow guns on their premises. The Cinemark massacre illustrates the ineffectiveness of this private gun-control policy.

Derrick Z. Jackson demands Wake up, Capitol Hill:

Gun control has so completely disappeared from debate that John Rosenthal, founder of the Newton, Mass.-based Stop Handgun Violence, told me this week before the Aurora shootings: 'I've never seen more spineless cowardice and lack of national leadership. Can you imagine the outrage if instead, 83 Americans a day died from hamburgers?'

Paul Krugman on Loading the Climate Dice:

[L]et's hope that this time is different. For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It's happening now.

Michelle Chen on Criminalizing Condoms: Sex Workers Get Policed but Remain Unprotected:

A new report by Human Rights Watch reveals how the criminalization of sex work in U.S. cities undermines civil rights and puts lives at risk.

Researchers say regressive prohibitionist policies make sex workers more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases as well as mistreatment and violence, sometimes at the hands of the very authorities that are supposed to be protecting them. The report focuses on a controversial police practice for targeting prostitutes: profiling people who are 'caught' carrying condoms.

John Nichols on Alexander Cockburn and the Radical Power of the Word:

Alex knew how good he was. He knew that he could take readers where other writers could not, to the fields of India where Coca-Cola was stealing water from peasants, to the barricades of neglected labor battles in Austin, Minnesota, and Toledo, Ohio; to 'The City' of London where the Libor scandal now unfolds. There were times when the going got rough; Alex's radicalism was genuine, and he could offend not just foes on the right but friends on the left. He parted company with mainstream liberals on issues ranging from gun control to global warming.

But no one could skewer the banksters, the robber barons and the crony capitalists of this broken era quite so ably as Alex.

His last column for The Nation was a delicious takedown of all the dark players involved in the scheme by the biggest bankers in the world to fix rates. The bankers got their due, of course, but so did the regulators and, of course, the pliant media.

Joe Stiglitz says America's prosperity requires a level playing field:

Despite what the debt and deficit hawks would have you believe, we can't cut our way back to prosperity. No large economy has ever recovered from serious recession through austerity. But there is another factor holding our economy back: inequality.

Any solution to today's problems requires addressing the economy's underlying weakness: a deficiency in aggregate demand. Firms won't invest if there is no demand for their products. And one of the key reasons for lack of demand is America's level of inequality ' the highest in the advanced countries.