Stephan:   I am writing this while listening to a news report about the latest gun Massacre; this one is in Kansas. Oh, that's the end of it, now it is back to the endless cud chewing over the latest Republican debate which struck me as nothing so much as a pissing match of 4th grade boys.  MSNBC gave the mass murder of four or six depending on whose report one is listening to, and 14 others wounded to varying degrees of severity, about 3 and a half minutes. It seems like just the other day that some previously non-criminal "good guy," an Uber driver in Kalamazo, Michigan,  spent the evening randomly driving around with his legal guns murdering six people between Uber gigs.  Oh, wait, it was just the other day. It passed almost unnoticed, wasn't even mentioned on the Sunday talk shows. And of course those are just the mass murders And now  in Iowa we have what may be the apotheosis of Second Amendment stupidity. A law permitting children to to possess firearms. What could possibly go wrong? Except the life of at least one human a week by a gun fired by a child. The weird thing is I got my first gun, a 22 rifle, at 11 when I became a Boy Scout and went through the NRA -- then a very  very different organization -- gun safety program. There was a cultural difference then however; there was none of the political obsession by Theocratic Rightists over guns. I have thought a lot about this, and I think the reason for the difference was that tens of millions of Americans, one way or another, had been caught up in World War II and, then, the Korean War. Almost every family had a member or a family friend who had been killed or wounded in one of those conflicts. Everyone understood people walking around with guns was a bad idea. We seem to have lost that recognition. How else to explain 92 people a day being killed by guns, and it is hardly a blip on the news. Even massacres have become commonplace, as this week demonstrates.