Le Shorter: The High Price of Guns

The Supreme Court apparently believes we are still a frontier society, because it decided the Second Amendment guarantees our personal firearms will not be taken away by the state.  Except that most of us do our food gathering at supermarkets nowadays, and the state militia gets paid vacations. Americans pay a high price for the right to bear arms. Stumptown is still in shock a week after an emotionally disturbed young man shot up a line of teenagers standing outside a local nightspot waiting to get in.  Because he was able to purchase a semiautomatic 9mm pistol--he told the gun shop we wanted to learn how to shoot and provided the required documents--the shooter was able to kill two teens and wound five before killing himself with a shot to his head. The father of an Italian exchange student traveled here to be at his critically wounded daughter's bedside. He told his daughter's bewildered American host, "I feel so sorry for you."  That says it all.

correction:  the fatally injured foreign student was a Peruvian national.