But nearly three weeks after the Dec. 14 bloodbath, the American far right – from elements of the Tea Party to bigoted bloggers to conspiracy theorists – is working itself into an absolute frothy uproar at even the possibility that it may become more difficult to purchase a military-style assault rifle or a magazine that carries dozens of bullets.

It’s reminiscent of the reaction that surrounded the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. That legislation, which applied only to newly manufactured guns, helped fuel a powerful militia movement – one that has been eclipsed by the recent surge in the anti-government “Patriot” movement, which includes armed militias.

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Ohio-based Buckeye Firearms Foundation has launched an Armed Teacher Training curriculum to offer gun training to teachers and school workers. According to Ohio's Fox 19, "As of Wednesday, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from several states including Ohio, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia." More than one-third of the 600 applicants are female.

According to Fox, the program, which will officially launch in Spring 2013, will take teachers through intensive gun training and will have course attendees take the same firearms test as law enforcement officers.

[h/t Think Progress]

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The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.

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Until last week my stance on the Second Amendment was essentially, "Our government can't be trusted with a monopoly on lethal power. As such, the right to resist tyranny embedded in our constitution justified the tragic deaths that would inevitably result from the proliferation of these incredibly deadly weapons."

I deployed to the Iraq War in 2004 as a U.S. Marine. I came to see my experience in Iraq as that of a pawn doing the work of liars, profiteers and chickenhawks. I say this to illustrate the point that my outlook on gun control comes from the standpoint of a Constitution-observing public servant and of a person who came to question the integrity of our system of governance to the very core. In short, I was reverent of the Second Amendment's freedom-guarding intent. I still am.

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The last bill would have prohibited any "magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition" except for any "attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition." Large-capacity magazines were used in the Aurora and Newtown massacres.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has also promised to introduce an assault weapons ban when the new Congress convenes. That bill is modeled on the federal ban, which expired in 2004. Both new bills would not outlaw the possession of banned equipment that is already in circulation. Senator Feinstein has cited a Department of Justice study that the ban reduced gun deaths by 6.7 percent.

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The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

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Topeka, Kan.,-based Westboro Baptist Church, better known as those "God Hates Fags" creeps, is already considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most recently it made news for threatening to picket the funerals of the Newtown massacre victims. The hacker group Anonymous responded with attacks on the church's online presence.

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Federal law prohibits gun sales to anyone who was declared mentally unfit by a court. In Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress passed a law requiring states to report these mental health records to the FBI. But in 1997, the Supreme Court threw out that requirement, saying states could share whatever information they wanted to—or more likely not share it.

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White male Republicans in redder regions are still the base for untrammeled gun rights, even if they're not the only ones. But when it comes to women, that number had been slowly moving in the NRA's favor -- and it's all part of a plan.

Four years ago, 30 percent of women told Pew that gun rights were more important to them than controlling gun ownership. This April, that number was 39 percent -- still less than the 60 percent of men who favored gun rights, but a dramatic rise nonetheless. And these women were likelier to be white; in the same poll, 57 percent of whites picked gun rights over gun control. African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly told pollsters they preferred gun control.

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"Let's be serious" Charles Krauthammer, pundit and former practicing psychiatrist, wrote recently in the Washington Post:

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated.

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

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The Journal, in what may be the deepest account yet of the inner workings of the Lanza family reports that:

* Adam Lanza stopped talking with his father, Peter, during summer 2010, which coincided with the time a relationship with Peter Lanza's now-wife turned serious.

* That Christmas, Lanza stopped communicating with his older brother Ryan.

* Nancy Lanza let Adam use her guns at a local shooting range in order to bond with him and "teach him responsibility."

The story suggests Adam Lanza's problems started in first grade, at Sandy Hook (where he attended classes through fourth grade). After a stint of home schooling, he was back in the Newtown system for middle school, but remained shy, socially awkward and isolated from classmates.

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But he didn't stop there.

We tracked down Rush's most inflammatory statements so you don't have to listen:

* "The NRA was very classy and laid back for a week. They didn't say anything, didn't get involved, didn't attempt to exploit it one way or another. They are the greatest, the largest gun safety organization in the country."

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Frankly, I haven't heard a stupider idea since Donald Trump offered Obama $5 million for his college records. But let's put aside the ridiculous impracticality of implementing LaPierre's proposal to deploy a veritable army of gun-toting guards into every school in America to "blanket" our children. Let's just address the philosophical horse crap of it.

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As soon as the speech was over, I went looking for the transcript, which can be found here, but in the first few moments after the news conference, the html line read "Armed police officers in every single school in this nation. This is insanity talking." Apparently, I wasn't alone in the world thinking that Wayne LaPierre was having a moment of psychosis and sociopathy in front of a national audience. And I felt an immediate kinship with the Washington Post news poster.

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Surprise, it's Rush Limbaugh.

On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh called the NRA leader "an adult looking for real solutions," and said he was "disrespected" by Code Pink protesters who, he claimed, would never interrupt a hearing on Benghazi.

"No matter what he said, Wayne LaPierre sounded like an adult looking for real solutions, but that's not what this country's interested in right now. Sorry. The adults are not running this show," said Limbaugh.

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But as Erik Wemple points out in the Washington Post today, Lott has not appeared on Fox News or its web site since the Newtown massacre -- but he has been a regular on CNN, on various panels and in much-talked-about arguments with Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan.

Wemple writes:

While Lott has been given ample opportunity on CNN to air his views on the Newtown massacre, he hasn’t yet spoken up on the matter on FoxNews.com. His last column surfaced Dec. 6, a second critique of Costas’ call for a new look at guns. He has written a column on the implications of Newtown — for U.S. News & World Report.

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On Monday, the network announced that "'American Guns' concluded earlier this year," adding, "Discovery Channel chose not to renew the series and has no plans to air repeats of the show." Yet Deadline notes that Discovery is conspicuously not airing reruns of the show as well. The network is likewise bidding adieu to "Ted Nugent’s Gun Country," with a confirmation that Nugent will not be returning any time soon. His rootin' tootin' show aired as a special in the fall, but at the time, the "musician/hunter" told Armed America Radio that Discovery "want[s] to do it as a regular feature," and to "expect that there will be at least a dozen shows a year." Also, there's an Armed America Radio.

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As Rush details on his web site, Lanza -- whose mother, Nancy, was reportedly a doomsday "prepper" -- either couldn't deal with the possibility of the Mayan apocalypse on Friday or wanted to "save people" from it.

As he pushed this theory, Limbaugh had it both ways. "I'm not espousing it, I just want to bounce off of it." Here's how he bounced:

The theory that Adam Lanza somehow had been convinced the world was gonna end Friday and he was discombobulated by it. His mother was a prepper and a survivalist and showed him guns and he went in there and did what he did to either deal with the pressure of it or maybe save people from the end, who knows what.  It happened in China, is the point.

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If 2011 numbers are predictive, more than 12,000 people will be killed by guns in America this year.

That’s four times the number of people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet while we mourned together as a nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then went to war against al-Qaida and two sovereign nations, it appears to have taken 20 schoolchildren being gunned down in Connecticut for politicians of either party to challenge the power of the NRA.

And this when even a strong majority of NRA members support common-sense gun control! Exactly how many bodies have to pile up for Washington to find the will to act?

Every day in America, 34 Americans are killed by guns. Every day in America, at least one of those killed is under the age of 14. In the wake of all-too-frequent mass shootings, we tend to ignore the even more frequent, quotidian gun deaths that are devastating our communities, destroying families and endangering our children. Here are just a few stories about lives that might have been saved with sensible gun laws.

Linkin Leatham, 2

Linkin’s parents called their son the “miracle baby” for having overcome several complications at birth and defying doctors’ expectations that he wouldn’t survive.  Then, in September, 2-year-old Linkin picked up his father’s handgun and shot himself in the eye, ultimately dying from his wounds. Linkin’s father is a Utah police officer, though the weapon involved in the shooting was not his service weapon.

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Assault, armed criminal action and unlawful possession of a weapon charges were filed against 57-year-old Lester Davis of Wentzville following the shooting Tuesday at All Cuts Barber Shop in Wentzville.

A patron made the comment that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School made him want to kill the suspect. For unknown reasons, police say Davis took the comment as a threat and asked, “You want to murder me?”

Davis then allegedly went to his car, retrieved a pistol and fired three times in the customer’s direction. No one was hurt.

Davis turned himself in and is jailed on $400,000 bond.

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