By 
President Barack Obama and presidential candidate Mitt Romney so far aren't getting heavily involved in the fresh round of gun-control debates in the U.S. I can't blame them. Who wants to go up against the 4.3-million-member National Rifle Association (NRA)? Not Obama and Romney, for sure. Not any politician seeking re-election in November.The July 20, 2012 massacre at an Aurora, CO movie theater triggered the new round of debates. A demented scholar, James Holmes, 24, killed 12 and critically wounded 58 in the five-minute slaughter. He is in jail and faces the death penalty by lethal injection.
Believe it or not, Holmes is being reported in the media as a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora before dropping out in June of this year.
Gun control in the U.S. hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now. It hasn't worked well in any other part of the world, either. Besides guns, the killer also had made bombs and other incendiary devices he used in booby-trapping his apartment. He had hoped to kill police when they came looking for him there.
Now how do you regulate against home-made bombs? You can't. Existing local, state and federal checks and regulations failed to flag Holmes. Why? Because he had no prior criminal record. He wasn't in the system.
Prohibition of liquor in the 1920s and 1930s in this country never worked, either, despite the documented actions against various crime cartels by federal treasury agent Elliot Ness and his team of Untouchables.Talking TV heads and politicians across the country again have entered the gun control debate. The print and electronic media love it. It gives them one more item to fill their morning or afternoon news log. But the comments are worthless. Nothing will become of them.
Like the suggestion by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City. He criticizes both Obama and Romney for not following up on their earlier stands against banning military-style weapons.
U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat, says a 1994 ban on the domestic sale of military-style weapons should be re-instated. The ban lapsed in 2004.
The ban prohibited the sale of 19 military-style guns and magazines holding more than 10 bullets. A joke. Those weapons could still have been purchased in the criminal underworld at any time.
"If there were no assault weapons available and no this or no that, this guy is going to find something, right?" Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said on CNN's "State of the Union." Hickenlooper is right, of course.
Holmes had more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition when he was arrested sitting quietly in his vehicle outside the Aurora movie house. He had spent more than $15,000 over the past several months buying ammunition, firearms and explosives from various legitimate retailers and at gun shows.
He didn't break any laws in purchasing the material and the retailers didn't violate any statutes, either. So how do you guard against a similar scenario happening again?
Not with written regulations, warnings or posters. You do it by word of mouth - at the local level. By retailers or other sellers and promoters of ammunition and weapons. A gut feeling that the purchaser may be a wrongie. Call the local law enforcement agency. Even if you are dead wrong this one time, your next call could be on target.
But what retailer would take a chance and ruin a sale by such an outrageous act? Very few. Very few, indeed. But that's what it will take to arrive at some near-future gun control in this country.
