Its The Guns Stupid! Bush's Charade on School Violence

President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez all spent some time yesterday pretending to address the issue of school violence.

Somehow they all managed to get through the charade without bothering to mention guns, although W did state that school violence is "inexplissible."

[Thank goodness Cheney didn't host one of these sessions--someone might've gotten shot!]

So, let's see. What do the most recent horrific episodes of school violence all have in common? Hmm. Could it be that the perpetrators were all armed with semi-automatic or automatic assault rifles?

What are police supposed to do when faced with a maniac in a school armed with automatic weapons? There's not much they can do.

But the good ol' Republican party, beholden to the nut cases at the NRA, wants you to know that they are worried about violence in schools, and that they are going to do something about it. Why, indeed, they are going to have a number of forums about the issue, and they are going to urge school administrators to work harder to "prevent" such episodes.

In fact, President Bush, who is "troubled" by the recent school shootin . . ., er violence, said that what communities need is a list of "best practices" to prevent the kinds of attacks we've had recently.

Well, thank goodness someone is doing something!

Our guess is that those best practices don't include banning assault weapons, closing loopholes in gun enforcement (such as allowing unrestricted sales at gun shows), boosting enforcement of existing laws and allowing negligent gun sellers to be held liable. Just a hunch.