Farewell to arms no easy task

Just a few hours after the tragic shooting last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six adults, my colleague suggested that we should discuss gun control in our weekly Across America Talk video program.

But the question we immediately asked ourselves was what we could discuss about gun control. We had just extensively discussed the subject in July right after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which took 12 lives.

In between, there was a shooting in August at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which seven people died, and then the shooting just days before the Newtown rampage in a shopping mall in Oregon, which killed three.

The US cable networks have been covering the Newtown massacre 24/7 over the past week. The conflict in Syria, the satellite launch by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the protests in Egypt which had dominated the news before the shooting suddenly no longer made the headlines.

Even the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" has been given little coverage despite the fact that US President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have not struck a deal so far to save Americans and the world from a possible panic only 11 days away.

When the Aurora theater shooting took place, Obama was reluctant to talk about gun control for fear of offending pro-gun voters in a close presidential election. This time, after securing his re-election, he has made many pledges and vowed tough action to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. On Wednesday, he said Vice-President Joseph Biden would lead the effort.

But if Obama is truly to use all the power he has, he probably should lead the mission himself to accomplish a mission impossible.

I would like to be wrong, but I think that after two more weeks, no one in the US is going to talk about the Newtown shooting or gun control, except for the families who lost their loved ones.

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