In a flourish of "not since 1920" the New York Times has played catch up with, of all vanguards, The New York Daily News. The somewhat exasperated, above-the-fold front page editorial rightly lambasts those who bemoan the torrent of bloody shootings but do nothing. The Daily News, in a true act of courage took the entire front page to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican presidential candidates who pray for the victims yet do absolutely nothing to change the culture of freely flowing weapons of terror in the US. The News called them cowards. The New York Times, 2 days later, countered with "moral outrage and national disgrace" in a barely competitive follow up to the remarkable News gesture.

The disgrace belongs to all the newspapers, journalists, commenters and talking heads who allow politicians and would-be leaders to dodge the critical questions of our home grown terrorism with a wave of "Second Amendment" or"better mental health screening". These cynical sheep avoid doing anything at all, even in the face of a mass killing every day, on average, of the year in the US.

Adam Gopnick has admirably dealt with the 2nd Amendment question and we all see the charade of blaming a faulty and underfunded mental health industry for mass gun driven slayings. But what are we to do with America's more than 300 million guns? If sending 11M undocumented workers out of the country is impossible, what could we possibly do with all those weapons and their zealous owners?

The issue is one of responsibility: we register cars, and guns, to keep the owners legally responsible for them. And the sellers of those items as well. If gun owners were responsible for the deaths caused by weapons they once owned, or if a single violation traced back to a sale could destroy the Walmart empire you can be certain guns would be controlled. Somehow a way would be found to hold legally responsible parties other than the admittedly insane (and usually dead) killers.