When will they ever learn?

OK, it’s repetitive; you’ve read it here before.

But that’s only because it’s in response to horrible stories you’ve also read here before, each one conveying the bogus hope this will never happen again, until of course it happens again, at which point the vicious cycle starts all over.

To borrow a futile line from Peter, Paul and Mary, “When will we ever learn?”

So now our attention is fixed upon Virginia Beach, where a madman executed a dozen former fellow workers, which was like dropping a green flag for every activist and headline-hunting pol to race to the nearest microphone with frenzied demands to make firearms all but inaccessible in America.

Get rid of guns and rifles, they mindlessly insist, and all this wanton violence will disappear with them.

Please. It’s cheap, knee-jerk rhetoric; it’s also old, tired and ineffective.

Why can’t they understand it’s what’s in the heart of a monster that matters, not what’s in his hands?

The Tsarnaev brothers had no need for guns the day they rained terror on the marathon. They used pressure cookers, remember?

Charlie Manson’s “family” didn’t worry about procuring weapons. They used knives, remember?

Ted Kaczynski? Tim McVeigh? They used bombs, remember?

The jihadists who killed thousands on 9/11? They used airplanes, remember?

Ted Bundy? Albert DeSalvo? They used their hands, remember? We’ve seen blood-thirsty barbarians drive pickup trucks into sidewalk crowds, remember?

Firearms? Yes, we’ve seen them cause the shedding of blood in schools, synagogues, Bible studies and concert halls, but if they had not been available, do you really think that would have dissuaded these assassins?

Well, they say, tighten up the laws, making ownership difficult.

Fine, but be aware the savage who slaughtered 20 elementary school kids at Sandy Hook did so with weapons legally acquired, just as the perpetrator of this carnage in Virginia Beach was armed with legally acquired ordnance, too.

Quick fix? Easy answers? That’s insulting.

There was a time in this country’s nobler past when massacres like these were unimaginable, even though guns and rifles were readily accessible.

Those times were different because we were different.

We didn’t run from values then; we taught them.

This cultural anarchy we’re now seeing did not emerge from a vacuum.

While blaming a firearm may play well to the crowd, it accomplishes nothing.

The law of the harvest assures us shall reap whatever we sow, and it’s become a very bitter harvest, hasn’t it?

We’ll begin to get better when we begin to get honest.

Until then, if nothing changes, nothing changes.

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