National Post writer upset because Democratic candidates aren't talking about Columbine (9 years later)

The National Post is apparently considered (by Canadian standards, at least) to be a "conservative" newspaper, but if so, that apparently doesn't extend to conserving fundamental rights, at least in this article.

The long, low halls of Columbine High School are lined with blue lockers and crimson history, decked with hand-drawn posters for Bible Study and the Knitting Club, cruised by laughing teens in Hollister and Aéropostale, then eerily silent when the classroom doors swing closed. We are nine years removed from the mass murder-suicide that happened here, and 10 miles south of a national political gathering at which the quieting of America's guns has never been mentioned.

I had a brief moment of hope (no--not that kind of hope) that "quieting of America's guns" was a reference to repealing the ridiculously draconian (not to mention unconstitutional) laws regulating suppressors ("silencers," in common parlance), but that was just foolishly excessive optimism on my part.

Ignored entirely in the electoral battlespace, yet unforgettable at Columbine and wherever else innocent life has fallen to a weapon fired in anger or insanity or accident, the issue of America's abundance of guns has made only a brief and semi-comical intrusion into Barack Obama's festival of Hope.

That last bit, of course, refers to the drug-addled, neo-Nazi, would-be assassins whose tiny, reptilian brains had conceived delusions of killing Obama. I have to disagree with the author's assertion that "America's abundance of guns" is being "[i]gnored entirely," though--both halves of the Obama/Biden ticket have made über-draconian gun laws central elements of their platforms. If they play that fact down at the moment, it's because they know that to fail to do so is to fail to get enough votes to win (and what does that say about the will of The People regarding gun rights?).

The author then went on to catalog (even including, bizarrely enough, the serial numbers) the "terrifying arsenal" the clowns had assembled for their "plot." The author, apparently, wants an explanation, or an apology (?!) for the fact that these doofuses had managed to acquire their "arsenal."

But this did not explain - or apologize for - a state or a country in which three stoned stooges with no jobs or fixed addresses can stuff their trunk . . .

Well, Allen, at least some of that (including at least one of the rifles) was stolen--you do realize that people without jobs or fixed addresses do manage to steal things sometimes, don't you? Is that enough of an "apology" for you?

The author then points out that neither candidate's website has much to say about gun legislation (don't worry Allen--they'll get to that after the election), and makes this melancholy observation:

So there is no looking to the candidates to end the carnage.

What kind of idiot even hopes to go "looking to the candidates" to somehow stop psychopathic punk kids from being . . . psychopathic punk kids?

Highlight of the article, hands down:

We were 11 miles from Columbine High when I asked [gun shop owner] Warren Marshall how he would feel if a weapon he sold legally were used by a Klebold or a Harris.

"How would you feel with a stump up your ass?" he replied.

The article ends, unfortunately, on a massive clunker of emotion-based hysteria.

"It's safe here," their principal tells them. In a land of rage and rifles, that may be the most hopeful audacity of all.

"Land of rage and rifles," eh? I'd much rather take my chances here than move to some land of sheep and servility.