New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof offers a typical column reacting to the massacre of 20 school children in Newtown, Connecticut. He calls on politicians to show courage in standing up to the National Rifle Association, but he doesn’t seem to have the courage himself to identify the key political culprits in a three-decade-long pandering to the NRA’s clout.

There’s a reason for that. The vast majority of the politicians who have served as handmaidens to the NRA’s war on commonsense gun control are Republicans, including such icons as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And it is routine for mainstream pundits, like Kristof, to avoid “sounding partisan.”

Emilie Parker, one of the victims of Friday’s murder rampage in Newtown, Connecticut.

So, it makes lots of career sense to wring one’s hands over the horrifying image of a deranged gunman slaughtering first-graders in their classroom and then spread the blame across the political spectrum – while not pointing fingers at the politicians who have most enabled this sickening madness to continue.

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