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I can't believe it.  I just can't believe it.  In the end, the gun lobby won.  I don't know what kind of America I'm living in anymore.  I thought for sure that now, we had them.  That finally this country was coming around to realizing we're no longer the Wild West and need assault rifles to shoot deer and "protect our homes." Oh, gun control opponents were very self-righteous with their "criminals do not submit to background checks," or "expanded background checks," as GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said piously, The New York Times reported this morning.  Why not just admit it, Charlie?  You submit to the piles of money the NRA throws your way.  I feel like we live in a land governed by whores.  Who will do anything, anything, for money.  When one of the Newtown fathers said, "Our hearts are broken," and Obama reached out and grabbed his shoulder, my rage turned to tears.  How could this unspeakable tragedy n...

So from everything I've been reading and seeing, the background check has been somewhat gutted.  Gun rights advocates won in the ban against so-called "friends and neighbors" gun sales, where people can still sell to relatives without requiring the buyer to go through a background check.  And I'm not clear on this, but I believe the idea of registering gun owners -- to me, an absolute necessity -- is also dying. David Weigl at slate.com notes that the NRA feels it's "winning" because, even though they're losing, in their minds, some of their "rights," they're gaining members opposed to any expansion of gun control.  But Weigl also reports that they can't really consider themselves winning because it's become open season on members, something this country has not seen since the 1990s. Anyway. . .so at least gun control advocates have topped the first hill, "defeating (in the Senate) an effort by conservatives to derail a...