Just off work early this gray Friday afternoon I sought escape and relaxation in sports talk radio but the hosts weren’t talking about sports. They were lamenting lost lives of children and the senselessness of random violence. Something pretty bad must’ve happened but I sensed these somber gentlemen weren’t going to reveal what so I decided to learn more later and turned to another sports show and they too were talking about children and death but offering few details so I turned to a conservative talk show and discovered that twenty-seven people, twenty of them children, had been shot and killed this morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

People who say they’re surprised by this are either imbeciles or liars. This isn’t a daily story in the United States but it’s a regular bloody nose. Attacks at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, a political rally in Arizona, and a Batman movie in Colorado generated big body counts and much national scrutiny, and plenty of other places have yielded fewer corpses and less publicity. They all bother me but, like media members, the higher the body count the more upset I am, and at home I needed comfort and reassurance. I sought it on the website of the NRA.

On the home page, in a column called Wayne’s Commentary, dated 11/27/2012, and titled More Guns, Less Crime in Virginia, I was soothed to learn that a professor “crunched the numbers in the state of Virginia, and has determined that gun sales in the state have climbed 73% since 2006, while the number of violent crimes involving guns has declined by more than 27%.”

You can depend on the NRA to make you feel better, even when another shy and tormented loner, this one named Adam Lanza, age twenty, used automatic weapons, a rifle and two pistols, to gun down his mother and then drive to an elementary school and slaughter kindergarten students and adults who tried to save them.

To read the NRA article “More Guns, Less Crime in Virginia,” please click here