Crazy tolerance for guns

... nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places ... or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, June 2008

She was hardworking, brilliant, attractive and vivacious, about everything you could want in a rising young political star. As a student, she'd won a Fulbright to study in Mexico, and gone on to earn a master's degree in regional planning.

She grew up to win a seat in Congress and win the hand of an astronaut. Gabrielle Giffords was born the very same day as our own Kwame Kilpatrick — June 8, 1970 — but except for the fact that both were ambitious, the resemblance pretty much stopped there.

She was from a fast-growing part of the country, a Democrat who survived this year's landslide to win a third-term in the U.S. House from a normally Republican part of Arizona.

Giffords' family was a truly 21st century one: bicoastal — her husband, U.S. Navy Captain Mark Kelly, is from New Jersey — and multicultural (she was Jewish, her husband, Christian).

They had demanding careers. He was scheduled to command the last-ever Space Shuttle flight this April, and they were raising his two children by a previous marriage. Their lives looked like an unfolding movie script: Robert Reich, who had been Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, said once, "I wouldn't be surprised if she's the first or second female president of the United States."

That's never going to happen now.

For as all the world knows, Gabrielle Giffords was drilled though the head last Saturday, as she was meeting with constituents on a street in Tucson, an event she called "Congress on Your Corner." The shooter seemed much like all the pathetic losers who turn guns on prominent people to try to give their own lives meaning.

Jared Loughner was a messed-up 22-year-old who had been booted out of community college for bizarre behavior. On websites he ranted incoherently about a supposed new currency and other issues that only he could understand. He seemed to read, with equal enthusiasm, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx and Ayn Rand.

Last fall, they told him he couldn't come back to college until he brought a letter from a mental health professional saying that he wasn't a danger to himself or others.

Loughner apparently never even tried to get such a letter. He probably knew he had no chance of that. He could do something, though.

He could buy a gun. So on Nov. 30, he bought a Glock semi-automatic pistol at a place called Sportman's Warehouse in Tucson. Perfectly legal; no questions asked.

If anyone had looked on the Internet, they would have seen a video of him saying, "You could call me a terrorist." But in our gun-happy society, whoever sold him the gun only had to check his driver's license and credit card.

> Email Jack Lessenberry