How free are we when NRA holds us hostage?

Like most Americans, I've become regrettably inured to the daily reports of gun violence and gun death in this country. Oh, I know, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." But last week's attempted slaughter of 10 Amish schoolgirls (as of this writing, five have died) hit me in a place the National Rifle Association had not yet calloused over with the propaganda it so routinely blares through a well-financed bullhorn of a public relations machine.

Why the gunfire in Nickel Mines, Pa., struck so hard, I'll never know. I guess the visual picture of Charles Carl Roberts segregating out children by gender, binding the girls' feet with wire and plastic ties, then shooting them execution-style, gut-punched me in a place I thought I'd toughened off and hidden away. I thought my emotions were bullet-proofed by the daily horrors we Americans are forced to stomach in the name of "Second Amendment freedoms."

Perhaps Roberts' psychotic ramblings about being "angry at God" touched off an unexpected reaction. Perhaps it was the laundry list of weaponry he brought into a one-room, unguarded, rural schoolhouse in a bucolic setting — a shotgun, a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and a stun gun — that seemed so insane.

According to police, he also had 600 rounds of ammunition, a hammer, a hacksaw, pliers, wire, eyebolts, rolls of tape and various paraphernalia, all of which seemed so beyond the pale. How can a milk truck driver acquire such an arsenal in a country that's supposedly free?

How free are we when peace-loving Amish children are slaughtered? How free are we when 30,000 Americans die by gunfire each year? How free are we when our elected officials are so hog-tied to the National Rifle Association that they cannot pass meaningful, national gun control?

How free are we when we let the following obscenely lengthy list of child deaths (and innocent adult deaths) take precedence over banning gun ownership outright? Just days before Roberts struck in Pennsylvania a 15-year-old boy brought two guns to a school in rural Cazenovia, Wis., and killed the principal. Two days before that, a 53-year-old man took six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., sexually assaulted them and used them as human shields for hours before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself.