Mayhem In Omaha: No Doubt It's The Shooter, Not The Gun, To Blame

Or something like that, which inevitably will be the right-wing gun fanatics' copping-out denial in the wake of the Omaha massacre.

We in the US of A have these nuts going ballistic, literally, a heckuva lot more frequently than anywhere else on earth, because in America, you can get your hands on heavy-duty firepower quicker and cheaper than anywhere else on the planet.

So when a deranged person goes off the medication, or otherwise breaks completely, the means of mass murder is much more available.

Don't talk to me about baseball bats, or steak knives. That's not what happens.

The killer does his (yes, pretty much always "his") greater damage - - whether in the high school hallway, on playgrounds, in restaurants, on the highway, or on a college classroom - - because the gun is available.

Those poor people in Nebraska. Out Christmas shopping, and gunned down.

Just ridiculous.

I note in updates from the Omaha World Herald that the killer used an SKS rifle.

The SKS is a military weapon that is often called an assault rifle, though because it's not manufactured to fire selectively in single or automatic bursts, it's just a plain old vicious, terribly deadly, non-assault rifle.

A carbine. To the general public, it's an assault rifle because it's military and devastating, and to the dead Nebraskans, it's of no consequence.

Anyway...

There are many SKS variants, having metastasized from the Soviet Union to China and throughout other former Eastern bloc countries, as a cheap, durable deadly, mass-produced and exportable military weapon - - a staple of the world arms trade.

Not with the ugly cachet of the true assault rifle, like an AK-47, but available from Africa to Asia...to southeastern Wisconsin, aina!

When I was a reporter for the old Milwaukee Journal, I remember covering a gun show in Elkhorn, where a dealer had three tables filled with new Chinese SKS rifles, with polished blond-wood stocks, fresh from wooden shipping containers.

$200 a pop.

Some people swear by them as hunting rifles.

Chai Vang, the Hmong hunter from Minnesota who killed six hunters in northern Wisconsin, used an SKS.

In the hands of a deranged citizen, whether during the deer hunting or Christmas shopping season, an SKS becomes the killing machine that it was intended to be.

We make it far too easy for people to own something on the order of an SKS. Is that what the 2nd amendment was really designed to guarantee:

That a 19-year-old kid could take one over to the mall and hunt people to go out in his blaze of glory.