‘Prayers’ just won’t do

It’s been a particularly grim and bloody month on one of the world’s great killing fields -- the United States of America.

On Friday, Los Angeles paused for the largest police funeral in its history when it buried Officer Randal Simmons, a 51-year-old father of two and the LAPD’s first SWAT team member to die in the line of duty. Simmons was shot dead and Officer James Veenstra was badly wounded when they -- along with others in their unit -- rushed into a San Fernando Valley home where a disturbed young man had killed three members of his family and was believed to be holding others hostage.

In Oxnard this week, an eighth-grader walked into a classroom and fatally shot a classmate in the head, apparently because the boy was gay.

On Thursday, at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student walked into a lecture hall, shot five students to death and wounded 16 other people before committing suicide.

There have been three other campus shootings since Feb. 8, including one at Louisiana Technical College, where a woman shot two students to death before killing herself.

Earlier in the month, a gunman in Kirkwood, Mo., burst into a City Council meeting, killed five people and wounded the town’s mayor. A few days before that, a gunman herded five women in a suburban Chicago clothing store into a back room and shot them all to death in what authorities believe was a botched robbery.

All these wrenchingly tragic crimes are linked by a common factor -- the ubiquity of guns in America. Given that we’re in the midst of the most hotly contested presidential campaign in recent memory, you’d think that all this bloodletting might become a campaign issue. If you thought that, you’d have reckoned without regard to the gun lobby’s near-total victory among the politicians of both political parties. The 2nd Amendment fundamentalists who cluster around the National Rifle Assn. are the most successful single-issue constituency in modern American politics.

The truth is that guns make the malicious, the malcontent and the mad powerful. They confer the power of life and death on the demented and deranged -- and yet we do nothing. There are more guns circulating in the U.S. today than ever before, somewhere around 250 million, according to projections by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The only one of the candidates who even nodded to the Illinois college massacre was Sen. Barack Obama, who happens to vote an easy drive from the campus. Campaigning Friday in Wisconsin, he said his “prayers” were with the victims and their families, then quickly added that he believes the 2nd Amendment confers an “individual right” to gun ownership.

The reason for that bob and weave is that the latter point is the gun lobby’s current cause celebre. Over the years, 11 of the 13 federal appellate districts have held that 2nd Amendment rights are collective, pertaining, as the Constitution says, to the maintenance of “a well ordered militia.” Recently, however, a court in the District of Columbia struck down that jurisdiction’s handgun ban, ruling that the 2nd Amendment confers individual rights to gun ownership. The case -- District of Columbia vs. Heller -- is before the U.S Supreme Court. Vice President Dick Cheney, 55 senators and 250 members of the House have filed a brief supporting the individual rights position to which Obama hastened to show such deference.

It isn’t as if our lawmakers aren’t willing to do something to protect our students, however. Twelve state legislatures -- those in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington -- are considering bills that would allow students who obtain concealed-weapons permits to carry guns on campus. Presumably, they’ll only fire in self-defense.

Confronted with this sort of social idiocy, it’s hard to know whether to chortle or choke.

How many times can we really stomach another politician telling us -- as Obama did Friday and President Bush did after Virginia Tech -- that their “prayers” are with the victims of that day’s gun-inflicted atrocity? Prayers won’t bring the dead back or make the living safer. Our children don’t need prayers; they need leaders with a modicum of moral courage.

Nobody is asking anybody to commit political suicide. But it would be better than edifying to watch just one of these dreary temporizers exhibit a fraction of the courage Randal Simmons, James Veenstra and their comrades showed when they put themselves at risk for people they believed were hostage to violence.

At the moment, we are a nation held hostage by the pandemic of gun violence. We need leaders brave enough to admit that, and to offer our children something more than a collective shrug and the chance to join the arms race that has made our school campuses a killing ground.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com