Fools go ‘mental’ on this

This is what we have become in America, every few days now instead of every few weeks or every few months: We have become the land of the free and the home of the guns. We just space out the kind of slaughter they had at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris less than three weeks ago. In our country, it is a Planned Parenthood clinic one day, a center for people with developmental disabilities the next. We are better at this kind of shooting than we are at baseball.

We have become a land sick with guns, and with the notion that every time there is another mass shooting like we had in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, that this is strictly a mental health issue, but never a gun issue. It continues to be that notion that is crazy in America, with a Congress that has done nothing to slow down guns since Sandy Hook Elementary School, as we move up on another anniversary of the slaughter there.

This time it was suspects with long guns walking into the Inland Regional Center during a holiday party, and before the shooting stopped and the shooters drove away in an SUV, we had 14 more victims dead from gun violence and at least 17 more wounded before two alleged shooters — a man and a woman — were killed during a gun battle with police. And on the campaign trail they want to talk about the threat of Syrian immigrants as only Hillary Clinton, out of all of them, has the guts to offer any common sense on guns.

Here is what Chief Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino police said on the terrible day when a mass shooting came to his city, when the killers with assaults walked into another soft target in a country of soft targets, in a world of soft targets:

“They came prepared for what they did, and they were on a mission. They came in with a purpose. They came in with the intent to do something.”

They came in with the purpose of shooting innocent people in a country where no one is safe from that. Nearly a week after Robert Lewis Dear shot three people dead in Colorado Springs in that Planned Parenthood clinic, this happens in San Bernardino. And you know how this will go now, what you will hear from so many major politicians in this country, including the ones running for President: That there is no law on the books that would have prevented this kind of gun terrorism from finding its way to the Inland Regional Center, the way it has found its way to elementary schools and movie theaters; the way it found its way to Paris.

They continue to shout the same things above the gunfire, and you always want to shout back at them that what is truly, toys-in-the-attic crazy is thinking that the laws already on the books in America — and the ease with which they enable anybody to get themselves a good, long killing gun — are working.

Listen to President Obama on this latest shooting, even if hardly anybody in Washington ever does; as they continue to act as if they are more interested in protecting the Second Amendment, written more than 200 years ago for muskets, than they are their own citizens, including those gunned down in San Bernardino:

“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. And there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently. . . . We have a no-fly list where people can’t get on planes, but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

It was less than two weeks before Christmas when it happened in Newtown, Conn., when Adam Lanza came through the front door of an elementary school with his own long gun, and snakes crawling around inside his head. It is just over three weeks from Christmas in San Bernardino, where a holiday party turns into a war zone. We are as effective stopping guns in America as we are stopping ISIS across the world. We just get the shootouts with more regularity here.

So it was not an elementary school in December 2015 the way it was in December 2012 in Newtown. You know what is truly insane? What is truly insane is the number of times we have had shootings like Newtown in just the three years since.

We talk constantly about concerns about terrorism coming back to New York City. But while the NYPD and the Joint Terrorism Task Force continue to keep us safe, no one could keep San Bernardino safe on Wednesday afternoon. Nobody could keep Colorado Springs safe from this Robert Dear. No one is safe in the home of the guns.