Back in the administration of W., we looked for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the wrong place; they’re here at home. Normally the W.M.D. I write about is the Standard American Diet (yes: SAD); occasionally I talk about food safety, or climate change, or related topics. But no matter what you look at, the basic problem remains so-called leadership that cannot stand up to big ag, big food, big energy, Wall Street …or the N.R.A.

Since 9/11, 33 Americans have been killed by “terrorists”; roughly 150,000 Americans have been killed by non-terrorists: that is, your run-of-the-mill murderers. Murder, like the leading cause of death — heart disease — is often preventable, through regulations, education and medical intervention.

We don’t know why Jared Loughner — had you, too, forgotten his name before he reappeared in the news on Tuesday? — shot Gabby Giffords, but we do know that he told his shrink that he wished he’d taken the antidepressants he’d been prescribed before the shooting. We don’t know why James Holmes allegedly shot up the Batman crowd, but we do know he was acting in a weird manner, and though his analyst told the police he was troubled, there was no one to help him. We gather that the suicidal Wade M. Page was a racist so ignorant he didn’t know a Sikh from a Muslim.

In any event, none of them seem to have been capable of distinguishing right from wrong. The easy solution to that is to make gun purchases more difficult, especially for disturbed people who appear to think they’re part of some “solution” to a series of “problems” identified by hatemongers. (Remember Bill O’Reilly all but calling for the death of the “baby killer,” the obstetrician George Tiller?)

We already have laws and regulations to protect us from murderers, at least when we call them terrorists. We have our mouthwash and water confiscated, we take our shoes off, we’re bombarded by X-rays and herded like cattle, photographed and eavesdropped upon. If a Muslim had flown a small plane into a movie theater, do you doubt that stricter laws governing the use of private planes would have followed? Yet you can buy a semiautomatic weapon online almost as easily as you can a book.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/bittman-guns-butter-and-then-some/?hp