Hands up: symbol of our surrender to gun lobby

A metaphor for a nation: Terrified students hustle across a school parking lot, their hands in the air.

It happened the other day at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: hands in the air. It happened at Columbine High School. It happened at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois and Central Arkansas.

It has happened at 142 schools. Yes, 142 — college, high school, elementary schools — since so many children died not quite three years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary. That’s about one shooting per week.

Hands in the air. The ones still escaping, the psychological victims of another gun atrocity, know not what to think, what to do, where to go — exactly like the country that would protect them.

This is the country that, as British wit John Oliver observes in wonderment, caught one shoe bomber and now requires every air traveler to shed shoes at check-in. But do anything about the gun carnage in its midst? No way. Just count bodies and pray.

We’ve had 986 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. Add the crime-of-passion shootings, the suicides, the drive-bys, the accidental deaths. What’s the toll?

Well, let’s put it this way: Just this year the gun carnage — 9,948 dead — is more than three 9/11s.

Where is Dick Cheney when we need audacity and overreach? Where are the spare-no-expense resources? Where’s Homeland Security?

Arming more Americans? Arming teachers? It doesn’t work. It can do just the opposite. More innocents can get killed.

So what’s the answer? Literally, it’s to treat guns as the public safety issue they are, just like automobiles. The answer is to register firearms and license their owners. The answer is to prohibit or revoke permits for those unfit to operate a killing machine.

In the absence of something that wouldn’t prevent gun ownership for the law-abiding but would change the reckless gun culture we’ve cultivated, we need to take action aimed at keeping guns out of the wrong hands.

Few Americans oppose background checks to prohibit gun ownership to criminals, the mentally ill, juveniles, non-citizens and more. But what happens when the background check system fails?

Democrats in the Senate have proposed a bill to close a loophole that made it possible for Dylann Roof to obtain a firearm before his shooting spree at a Charleston, S.C., church.

Called the “default to proceed” loophole, the ambiguity in the law means that if a gun dealer doesn’t get back FBI background check authorization in 72 hours, the transaction can proceed.

In 2012 alone, the loophole allowed 3,722 people to buy guns who otherwise would have been ineligible.

Back when all were filled with religion in the “war on terror,” the principle was that we would do everything at our disposal to prevent further terrorist attacks.

What Dylann Roof did was a terrorist attack. What the shooter in Oregon did was a terrorist attack. For years it has been one terrorist attack after another.

We have to stop denying that we are arming homegrown terrorists. Let’s lower our hands and put them to work. Let’s change a culture that makes the fates of helpless people secondary to pieces of metal that propel pieces of metal through the air.