Abbreviated pundit roundup: Michelle Obama, Arne Duncan and Valerie Jarrett's message

Michelle Obama, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett will attend the funeral of guns shooting victim Hadiya Pendleton  tomorrow. Here's The Chicago Sun-Times on the significance of tomorrow's event:

By coming to Hadiya's South Side funeral ' not far from where Duncan, Obama and Jarrett once lived ' the message is clear:

Urban violence is as much the nation's scourge as the mass shootings that have so gripped our consciousness. The terror in Newtown is an everyday reality in Chicago, and gun-control measures, including universal background checks and a crackdown on straw purchasers, are even more needed here.

But that's not enough, which is why Duncan's presence as the nation's educator-in-chief is so meaningful. Good schools, good family supports and strong communities can do far more than any tough law ever could. [...] The presence of these three Chicagoans, leaders who undoubtedly feel Hadiya's loss deep in their souls, is an important start, telling the nation that this pain is simply too great to bear.

Frank A.S. Campbell at Bloomberg on the effectiveness of gun background checks:

Congress responded by passing the NICS Improvement Act, authorizing $1.3 billion in grants to fund state agencies and court systems to create the necessary information infrastructure. Yet even after additional mass shootings, the authorized sums were never requested by the president or appropriated by Congress; indeed, the plan has received only token funding -- $50 million since 2009, or 4 percent of the authorized amount. As a result, information collection remains uneven, the databases full of gaps. [...]
Rather than let the system fail due to insufficient funds, we should emulate the investment approach taken by the government's DNA Initiative, which for the past eight years has helped state and local governments outfit their DNA laboratories and dramatically decrease backlogs of unanalyzed DNA samples from convicted offenders, arrestees and crime scenes.

Let's go below the fold for more analysis of the day's top stories...