Republican politicians gathering at the National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis are eagerly pandering to a powerful political lobby that is intent on making the US gun laws weaker and more riddled with more dangerous loopholes. Rather than tackling public safety risks, Mitt Romney and others offered nothing but exhortations to defend the Second Amendment's right to bear arms at all costs. Polls show Republicans enjoy heavy support and donations from gun owners. In return, the gun lobby has had steady success in weakening gun laws — especially in the two dozen statehouses that followed Florida in enacting new self-defense laws to allow the instant use of deadly force in a confrontation rather than retreat from danger. The families of the victims killed and wounded in the Virginia Tech massacre do not come close to having such clout. For the tragedy's fifth anniversary next week, they are having a hard time securing meetings with Washington politicians to fix the law that promised a more complete and up-to-date federal list of the mentally ill, who should be barred from buying guns. But two dozen states have submitted fewer than 100 mental health records each when tens of thousands should be entered, according to a national gun reform group. Financing to help state reporting efforts was supposed to be $1.1 billion over the last four years, yet Congress appropriated only $51 million. So goes the nation's utter failure to deal with the gun menace. — Excerpts from a New York Times editorial __
