Rapaire, your response is eminently sane and reasonable, and I agree with you completely that to "bring the troops home NOW" is regrettably impossible now that they're in there, and also that neither "No Child Left Behind" nor any other government program will serve as a panacea for the many shortcomings of our educational culture.

However, I'm holding out on my assertion that our ridiculous overabundance of murders can very reasonably be blamed on the corporations and individuals who profit by the sale of ammunition. (Guns are only the delivery system -- the real money is in the consumables, just as for the toner in laser printers.)

Who do you think finances the NRA, and why? True, fairly large numbers of individual citizens are regularly stirred to political action, insisting upon their constitutional right of access to automatic assault weapons. Indeed, their voices are so loud and insistent that they bear influence 'way out of proporation to their (minority) numbers.

If find it hard to believe that all this enthusiasm for murder weapons is spontaneous; don't you suspect the influence of a well-financed orchestrating hand? I sure do. There's *plenty* of money in it, that's for sure, and no other plausible explanation. Do deer hunters really need Uzis and cop-killer bullets?