In the wake of yesterday’s massacre in Virginia, here’s Pat Salber about the gun massacre on campus.

We need to empower and fund reputable organizations to perform the research on violence and violence prevention. (It has effectively disappeared from the Center from Disease Control’s research agenda in the last six years).  We need to put the health and safety of our kids ahead any other political agenda…can we possibly value  gun ownership more than the safety of our kids at school?

If our past actions are a predictor of the future, then this is what will probably happen.  Time will pass and the rawness of our emotions, so exposed right now in the aftermass of the Virginia Tech Massacre, will dampen. We will start to waffle on any enthusiasm to pursue rational gun control…we simply won’t care as much as the folks who profit from profligate sales of firearms.   And then we will be right back to where we have been for the last twenty or thirty years, waiting for one more (short-fused) time bomb to explode onto our campuses and into our national psyches.  

How many more school kids need to get shot to death? How much more campus blood and gore do we need to see?  How many more unbearable tragedies do American families need to endure before we finally stand up and demand a change in our national firearm policy?