“This person -- if there were no assault weapons available, and no this or no that -- this guy’s going to find something, right?” he said. “If it was not one weapon, it would have been another.”

Eight months later, Hickenlooper has changed his tune.

As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Hickenlooper is poised to sign some of the toughest new gun control laws in the nation, capping a journey that has transformed a popular, data-driven Western Democrat who takes his son shooting into an unlikely frontman for bringing new gun laws into the center of the United States.

After Aurora (after Oak Creek, after Newtown) Hickenlooper started "asking questions about guns and death," the Times notes. "Did ammunition limits make sense? Did background checks really keep guns away from potential killers?"

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Obama is drawing attention to the worst shootings of 2012, inviting the police chiefs from: Aurora, Colo., where 12 were killed in July; Oak Creek, Wis., where six died in a Sikh temple assault: and Newtown, Conn., scene of the most recent mass tragedy that left 20 first-graders dead.

A White House official says representatives from the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Major County Sheriffs Association will also participate in Monday's White House meeting.

Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will attend.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting publicly.

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"He was always sending us to buy books, uniforms and shoes for poor children...Any money he made from preaching, he would spend on donations. He wasn't interested in a bigger house for himself or a new car. He just wanted to help poor people."

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Dalbir Singh was murdered just 10 days after a white supremacist massacred six people – five turbaned men and one woman – in the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek. He was one of hundreds of local community members I joined last week to mourn the victims killed in what authorities are calling a hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism.

The killers did not ask for money, nor did they take anything from the store, from what we know so far. Law enforcement has a suspect in custody and is investigating the murder as attempted armed robbery – the crime took place in a depressed neighborhood, and police say there's no evidence of bias. But that offers little relief for Sikhs in Milwaukee and across the country. For us, the murder is experienced as the continued assault on our ability to live, work and worship without fear.

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"My president," he told the crowd, making a dramatic gagging gesture, "is trying to pass a gun ban. So he's staging all of these murders, like the ‘Fast and Furious’ thing down at the border, in Aurora, Colo., all the people that were killed there, and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple … I don’t know where I'm gonna live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

And then, presumably, he continued to rock some gnarly tunes while the rest of the band rolled their eyes. Mustaine's comments might have gone unnoticed had TMZ not posted video of the tirade, which immediately went viral. Because you don't often get to see that much gibberish combined with that much hair.

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Fast-forward to 2012, and the danger posed by right-wing extremists still exists, as demonstrated by the recent Sikh Temple massacre, in Wisconsin. Yet DHS continues to turn a blind eye, says Johnson.

“Right around the time I went public last year, they hired a brand-new person with no experience and no law enforcement connections,” Johnson told Salon. But shortly thereafter the new hire was transferred to a different unit, again leaving just one analyst on the beat. A year later, Johnson says, “absolutely nothing has changed.”

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David Conrad, a resident of Morton Grove, Ill., was likely peeved by the noise from the Muslim Education Center. Conrad’s home is adjacent to the center’s parking lot, and during the holy month of Ramadan, men, women and children pack the mosque on a nightly basis. On Friday, Aug. 10, Conrad allegedly shot a pellet rifle at the mosque wall, while some 500 people were praying inside. The building structure sustained minor damage, but no one was hurt. Was this just the rumbling of a disgruntled neighbor? Maybe.

But given a chain of incidents at mosques across the country over the past two weeks, the Morton Grove shooting doesn't appear to be an isolated event. In the past 10 days, there have been eight cases of vandalism and attacks on houses of worship across the nation, including the deadly shooting spree in a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin on Aug. 5. The other seven incidents were mosque defacements, which have sent a tremor of fear through America’s Muslim community.

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Imagine my surprise a few years ago, when I first started researching my book, and I found the Celtic cross as the very first image in the ADL's online database of "general racist symbols." The text responsibly notes that the cross "is used widely today in many mainstream and cultural contexts. No one should assume that a Celtic Cross, divorced from other trappings of extremism, automatically denotes use as a hate symbol."

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Places that know their variation of the story, that have suffered human wreckage and been left behind, must ache from the next round of oblivious headlines that repackage each event as if it’s a new sensation, Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before.

On the surface, Moses Lake, Washington, seems to be recovered from its wounds. Driving east from Seattle over the Cascade Mountains, across the Columbia River, you find this town by being careful not to let it pass you by. With little shade, it’s ten to twenty degrees warmer than Seattle’s emo coastline, and as the mountains disappear farther behind you, one horizon melts away into another. Rolling plains spread to the south and north of the freeway. Crops are labelled on fences: alfalfa, potatoes, corn.  At times the vast golden expanse looks like the Wild West. Suddenly it could be South Dakota, except for the broad lake with a fountain in the middle.

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We have yet to determine if Page mistook Sikhs for Muslims, but such questions are irrelevant. In today's Islamophobic atmosphere, there has been increased marginalization of all AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian) communities. In particular, Sikh Americans have faced the brunt of post-9/11 hate crimes and backlash, with Sikh men often being mistaken for Muslims. The first post-9/11 hate crime murder was of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona, whom the murderer chose because he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”

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Dan Gross, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence:

The overwhelming majority of Americans from across the political spectrum favor sensible measures like background checks, which can prevent much of the gun violence that occurs in our nation -- measures that are completely consistent with the Second Amendment.   A recent Frank Luntz poll shows that a full 74 percent of NRA members support background checks to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.  The problem is the dramatic disconnect between what the American people want and what our elected officials -- even our presidential candidates -- are doing about it.  

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This species of argument --  it might be called "Guns-don’t kill people, they do" -- conveniently exonerates gun rights types  from any responsibility for, or even connection to, massacres carried out with guns. After the Aurora shooting, Charles C. W. Cooke provided the following example in National Review.

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Wade Michael Page strode into the temple carrying a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition and opened fire without saying a word, authorities said.

When the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee ended, six victims ranging in age from 39 to 84 years old lay dead. Three others were critically wounded.

Page, who joined the Army in 1992 and was discharged in 1998, was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "frustrated neo-Nazi" who was active in the obscure underworld of white supremacist music.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the nonprofit civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., said Page had been on the white-power music scene for more than a decade, playing in bands known as Definite Hate and End Apathy.

"The name of the band seems to reflect what he went out and actually did," said Potok. The music often includes lyrics that discuss genocide against Jews and other minorities.

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Then the shooting started, sending terrified congregants scrambling for cover.

When the gunfire finally ended in a shootout between a gunman and police outside the temple in suburban Milwaukee, seven people lay dead, including the suspect, and three others were critically wounded in what police called an act of domestic terrorism.

Satpal Kaleka, wife of the temple's president, Satwant Singh Kaleka, was in the front room and saw the gunman enter the temple, according to Harpreet Singh, their nephew.

"He did not speak, he just began shooting," said Singh, relaying a description of the attack from Satpal Kaleka.

Kaleka said the 6-foot-tall bald white man — who worshippers said they had never before seen at the temple — seemed like he had a purpose and knew where he was going.

Federal authorities described the suspect as a white man in his 40s, but neither provided further details nor suggested a possible motive, including whether he specifically targeted the Sikh temple.

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