But a ban on firearms would be more like a Band-Aid on a gushing artery. The horrific act at the Newtown, Conn., school would not necessarily have required firearms; after all, Timothy McVeigh destroyed young lives at an Oklahoma City day care center in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb.

The use of firearms in atrocity is more the symptom than the sickness in the continual progression of evil now before America.

In his book "Slouching Toward Gomorrah," failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork best pointed out the cause of this evil. It is a growing permissive society allowing the alienation of what we once regarded as moral absolutes. There is no longer a line in the sand about what we Americans once regarded as inviolate and sacred values.

Instead there is every type of violent video game, featuring every kind of gore, and there is the mass media of television, movies, and the Internet mirroring each bloody death, most often in 3-D widescreen with Dolby stereo sounds full of screams and howling anguish.

Couple the prolific advance of movie and video game violence with a leftist emphasis that abortion, euthanasia, gateway drugs, promiscuous sex, or a president who lied about it being both good and natural, and one could have almost predicted that monsters like Adam Lanza would come and visit us.

The evidence is palpable against the mass media in a society where the left's standard bearer, the American Civil Liberties Union, once rushed to the defense of odious, misogynistic Larry Flynt to continually advance the exploitation of women.

One wonders whether the ACLU would as vigorously defend the Second Amendment as Hustler Magazine's bastardization of the First.

F.D. Davant

King George