'When the kid in your town gets killed'

That's what the advocates of forcible citizen disarmament wait and pray for.

The article I linked to above, "Gun control backers not bold on 2009," is mostly about making an assertion that I don't really buy--that the gun ban extremists don't have big plans for the post election future. I believe they do, and if I'm right, what does the fact that they fear to move on their agenda until after the election say about what the people want?

Still, that's not the issue I'm writing about today. Today, I want to talk about what the gun ban extremists so eagerly await.

House Democrats have not championed major gun control legislation this Congress. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a gun control advocate, noted that many freshman Democrats — as well as next year’s prospective freshman Democrats — favor gun rights.

He doesn’t expect many more co-sponsors to McCarthy’s bill. “We probably have all the support we’re going to get,” Nadler said of the measure’s 66 backers.

“The national climate has to change,” he said.

Asked when it will, Nadler responded, “When the kid in your town gets killed.”

Good people, healthy people, normal people, with their humanity intact, look at a murder with a mixture of outrage and sorrow. Advocates of forcible citizen disarmament, on the other hand, look at it as an opportunity.

When an evil, twisted sociopath murdered thirty-two people at Virginia Tech, Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) introduced H.R. 1859 (to mandate low-capacity magazines) before the bodies had been removed from the scene (a ten round magazine capacity limit, by the way, would have done nothing to reduce the carnage that awful day).

Similarly, the Brady Campaign issued a plea for money ($32, no less) immediately on the heels of that atrocity.

Then there's the VPC:

. . . and the fact that until someone famous is shot, or something truly horrible happens, handgun restriction is simply not viewed as a priority.

I have a tendency to compare the gun ban extremists to various docile, hoofed herbivores, but perhaps vultures are a more appropriate metaphor.