USA, pervasively corrupt

The US has 751 people per 100,000 in prison. 

That's the highest incarceration rate in the world, five times the rate in England, eight times the rate in Germany, 12 times the rate in Japan. Yet the US mostly refuses to prosecute financial criminals like those whose malfeasance brought on the 2008 financial crash, and like the HSBC executives who for decades laundered money for Al Qaida terrorists. 

Why? Those financial institutions and their executives are big-time political donors, and they're big-time practitioners of the bribery that largely controls legislation in the US, and so heavily influences other government action here.

On 13 December a disturbed man attacked 20 or more young pupils and at least one adult in an elementary school. 

A day later, another disturbed man attacked 20 or more young pupils and at least one adult in another elementary school.

Every victim of the first attack is still alive. Twenty-six victims of the second attack, twenty of them six or seven years old, died.

What was the difference? The first attacker was in Chengping China and had only a knife. The Sandy Hook attacker brought a semi-automatic assault rifle and two handguns. 

Guns do kill. All over the world, people in democracies understand that. They've sensibly persuaded their governments to protect them from guns. 

Even a few undemocratic governments understand that.

Not in the USA. Why? Because 5,400 US gun manufacturers make huge profits on gun sales, $13.6 billion in 2011, and nothing stops them from shovelling enough of that money to the NRA, and directly to politicians, to buy obstruction of effective gun control.

Is this corruption specific to finance and guns? No. It also pervades the US prison industry, the US pharmaceutical industry, the US health insurance industry, the US energy industry, US defence industries and the US media.

You're expecting Sandy Hook to trigger a big change in gun control in the US? 

Mass Murders and Shooting Sprees in USA

There's a thought-provoking piece on the Mother Jones web site. It includes a map, a portion of which is depicted below:

The original map image depicts the entire nation, and further, if you hover your mouse over the various dots, a pop-up provides additional information about each incident.
I urge you to visit the original article and map:
Mass Murders and Shooting Sprees in the USA.
If Friday's horrific incident is not enough to provoke some serious debate about gun-control in the United States, it's difficult to say what is.
The irony of the situation is that statistically speaking, violent crime has never been lower in the United States. People have never been safer than now. Unfortunately, they do not feel safe, and therefore they feel the need to possess arms -- in case something like this happens to them. The facts, however, speak otherwise. In all these violent incidents, there has been only one occurrence in which a bystander shot the assailant. And even in this case, the facts bear closer scrutiny. What actually happened was this: the assailant escaped the scene on a bicycle; the citizen chased him with his car, knocked him down, and then departed his vehicle and shot the perpetrator. In sum, this is hardly a justification for his possession of the weapon; the vehicle was more than enough.
The standard (one might almost say knee-jerk) justification for the right of an American citizen to possess an assault weapon is the Second Amendment. But even this occurs in more than one version (one version was passed by Congress, another was ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State). The differences are minimal, having to do with capitalization of certain words, but they do have one thing in common: they are almost always cited in part and/or out of context. Here is the version that Jefferson authenticated:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
One might first of all point out that this "right" should be understood in the context of a militia. That would have been my own interpretation. However, in 2008 the United States Supreme Court ruled (District of Columbia v Heller 554 US 570) that the right to keep and bear arms does not depend upon one's membership in a militia, and that the right extends to the use of said firearm for lawful purposes, including defense of one's home.
President Obama has sworn "to do everything in my power to prevent these senseless acts from ever occurring again." The real question, I suppose, is How much power does he have?
As David Frum, well-known conservative thinker and former presidential speechwriter, phrased it, "The real problem is to keep the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people." Mr. Frum is perhaps being realistic. A general ban on firearms in the United States is simply a non-starter; perhaps he is right to begin with a ban on automatic and even semi-automatic weapons.
Such a ban would demand the surrender of all such weapons to law enforcement agencies, and further that anyone found in possession of such a weapon be subject to an automatic term in prison.
I would also argue for the imprinting of all firearms with a non-removable identification number, which shall appear on every bill of sale of said weapon. This would enable the tracking of each and every weapon from the factory in which it was manufactured through all its middle-men, all the way to the household cabinet in which it ultimately is stored. Obviously, this will do nothing about all the millions of weapons already in the hands of the public, but it is a start.

Save the children. From our guns.

There are 2 to 100 times more gun murders and suicides per capita in the US than in other developed countries. 

You could argue that if US adults are crazy enough to elect politicians who are in the pocket of the gun lobby, if they're crazy enough to elect them over and over again, maybe they deserve their bloody fates.

But a child living in the US is 42 times more likely to die from gun violence than a child living in other developed countries.

Nobody has the right to do that to children.

Starting with the Appeaser-in-Chief, US politicians and pundits have already resumed the chant, "Now is not the time to debate gun control". 

This is exactly the time. 

Eliot Spitzer said it best:

There's the old line, now is not the time to talk politics. Let's be clear. Silence is politics. Silence is cowardice. Silence is acquiescence. Silence is what the NRA wants. Those who are silent should be thrown out of politics ... If you are silent, you are a coward. 

The biggest terrorist menace in the US is the NRA. Now isn't the time to be a coward.

P.S. To get a little closer to the 20 kids and six teachers killed at Sandy Hook, goto http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/connecticut-shooting-victims_n_2308463.html and scroll down to the slideshow.