Don’t forget us, Gabby

Gabby Giffords is still one savvy politician, even if she’s had to leave Congress to recover from her terrible wounds. She knows how to drum up some publicity for a good cause. Last week there she was at a shooting range, popping off a few rounds at a target in Las Vegas. Good copy.

It turns out that Ms. Giffords and her astronaut husband have owned guns for years, and are big fans of the Second Amendment. The nutcase who opened fire on her — and a bunch of other good people — back in early 2011, killing six, wounding Gabby Giffords and a dozen others, might have given her a cause, but he didn’t change her political instincts.

She and her husband, Mark Kelly, are on something of a whistle- stop tour. They’re trying to restart that stalled effort in Congress to expand background checks for those— all those — who want to buy a gun in this country.

The current law has a loophole as wide as a shotgun pattern when it comes to background checks. If you buy a gun at Wal- Mart or your local gun shop, you have to pass a background check before you’re allowed to carry heat. But for online sales, or sales at those gun shows that seem to pop up along interstates every few months, no background checks are required.

Remarkable. Imagine if teens were told they’d have to show ID to buy beer if they went into a liquor store, but not if they paid at the drive- through. How many under- aged drinkers would park and go inside? If you think approximately zero, you’re right.

And if you knew something in your background — a felony? a mental disorder? — would keep you from buying a gun at Gander Mountain, wouldn’t you just wait for the next gun show to come ‘ round?

Closing that loophole is something that should have been done before Gabby Giffords, and so many other innocent people, became victims. So naturally, when this common- sense reform made it to a vote in