Damn, how could we blow this big gun-control opportunity?

Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries.

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Doesn’t it seem odd that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars, and intercept metadata from just about every phone call in the country, to deal with a threat that, for now, kills but a few Americans annually — while we’re too paralyzed to introduce a rudimentary step like universal background checks to reduce gun violence that kills tens of thousands?

Wasn’t what happened at Sandy Hook a variant of terrorism? And isn’t what happens in troubled gang-plagued neighborhoods of Chicago just as traumatic for schoolchildren, leaving them suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?

I don’t see any glib solutions here, just a need for a careful balancing of risks and benefits.

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