There was another mass shooting here in California last Friday, right in Santa Monica close to where good friends live. It's also close to where Lawrence O'Donnell lives. Did you hear about it?

It didn't seem to splash onto the national radar the way one might expect, given that the deranged young man armed with 1300 rounds of ammunition, an assault-style rifle, and other weapons went to a community college instead of an elementary school. After reporting on Newtown, I guess the national media decided they'd had enough, even though the shooting happened within a few miles of a fundraiser with President Obama in attendance.

Or maybe it's just not newsworthy. After all, college students and older people caught in the crossfire unleashed by a determined, violent young man just doesn't play the same as another angry young man gunning down six-year olds, right?

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene.

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If the National Rifle Association (NRA) were not so dangerous to the physical health and general welfare of the people of the United States, they'd probably qualify as some of the most unintentionally hilarious people on the planet. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Take executive vice-president of the NRA, (the suspiciously French sounding) Wayne LaPierre. If you started from scratch and constructed an (at least theoretical in his case) human being, you couldn't find a better movie villain. A man who foams at the mouth when fetishising about guns on national TV, attacks sitting Presidents in terms usually reserved for dictators and inaugural-lip syncers and has the look of a howling mad member of Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice's gang from Dick Tracy - replete with the beady eyes, vestigial rage and bad posture.

That Lapierre's little gaggle of government-fearing, 1970s-Death-Wish-obsessing miscreants actually claim they're trying to increase people's safety can almost make your sides hurt from the hysterics, as it carries with it the legitimacy of Manti T'eo giving lectures on Nigerian bank swindles.

These are the guys who released an iPhone app for kids as young as four to shoot at coffin-shaped targets on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown Massacre. That little high-capacity-magazine of brilliance has probably jetted them right past Applebee's on the sliding scale of public-relations brilliance, up next to Alex Rodriguez.

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Joe Biden just wrapped up one of his best on-fire speeches in Connecticut, not far from Newtown. He declared the days of NRA supremacy over, saying that "inaction on gun control is unacceptable." Then he aimed his verbal fire at the NRA, via TPM:

The “standing assumption” today is that “this is kind of the third rail of politics,” Biden said. “That if you take this on, somehow, there will be a severe political price to pay for doing it. Because that’s what’s happened in the past.”

The old rules no longer apply after the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn., Biden said, calling inaction on gun control “unacceptable.”

“What I say to my colleagues … I say to you, if you’re concerned about your political survival, you should be concerned about the survival of our children,” he said. “And guess what? I believe the price to be paid politically will be to those who refuse to act, who refuse to step forward. Because America has changed on this issue.”

Also, the Washington Post:

Biden, his voice getting louder and louder, delivered a point-by-point rebuttal of the National Rifle Association and other gun rights activists’ arguments against stricter gun restrictions. Biden argued that people do not need AR-15s and other so-called assault rifles for self-protection.

“They say well, it’s about our culture,” Biden said. “The facts are our culture’s not killing 25 people a day. It’s weapons and high-capacity magazines. It’s criminals who get guns without going through a background check.”

Biden accused some questioners on his online chats of planting questions designed to place roadblocks to his gun-control agenda.

“They say, all you’re going to do, Biden, you and the president, you’re going to deny law abiding citizens their rights under the Second Amendment,” Biden said. “Not true.

Let the pearl-clutching begin! Tomorrow is a Day of Action on gun control, sponsored by Organizing for America. It's time for the majority to tell the NRA to sit down and let sane people work on reasonable gun laws, beginning with universal background checks.

At last, someone calls the NRA what they are: trolls. Rachel Maddow is absolutely right. They're just playing the "how can I get a reaction" game while the rest of us are actually trying to have an adult discussion. This is characteristic of trolls: They intend to disrupt and disturb rational conversations in order to put the attention on themselves. In the case of the NRA, they're hoping their disruption will not only slow momentum building for reasonable gun safety laws, but also focus attention on them and their stupid fearmongering about losing their guns.

We all know how to treat trolls, right? Repeat after me: We don't feed the trolls. We don't pay attention to the trolls, we don't give them any attention whatsoever. We keep having our adult conversation, which even Joe Scarborough and Michael Steele are involved in, while ignoring the lunatics over there on the sidelines trolling for attention.

Alrighty then. Back to work.

Bob Cesca points to this interview Chris Christie gave about gun control.

Christie was asked about specific gun control measures, and instead talked about violent video games. “We don’t allow those games into our house…we think it desensitizes children to all the effects of violence,” and added that all of the issues related to gun violence needed to be dealt with.

When pressed on why he couldn’t answer whether he supports a ban on assault weapons, he said that it depends. “These are complicated issues,” he said. “I’m willing to have that conversation.”

As Bob says, it sure sounds like Christie is toeing the NRA line.

But how good is that line?

Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary since a member of Congress was shot. Gabby Giffords, along with 19 other people, were shot on that day, leaving six dead, including a federal judge. In the days following the shooting there was a lot of finger-pointing going on. Some of that came from the left. They pointed to gun violence in political ads as a possible motivator, including this map Sarah Palin had posted on her website that includes a target over Gifford's district.

Quickly the right went into defensive mode, calling it "crazy" that anything could influence someone to do something so horrendous. They launched into the "personal responsibility" meme to defend Palin and any other political ads that portray violence. It's much the same as we hear when someone is arrested for planning or executing a serious crime and we find out their reading list was Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity. They believe it's not them influencing the person, but just the person themselves.

So how does the same not apply to video games and movies? Are we to believe that video games and movies can create violent people, yet the images and words used by our leaders, both political and media, can't? If there was ever a definition of hypocrisy, it would be right here.

And speaking of hypocrisy, let's talk about a video game. The one I want to talk about is where you play a brave Christian soldier charged with the mission of ridding the world of non-believers. How do you do that? Well, by shooting them, of course! Here's the trailer from the game.

And did the right start condemning this video game for its violence and say it would provoke our people to go out and kill? Absolutely not. Instead, they went into a full force embrace of the game. Even the Department of Defense, under George Bush, was linked with sending the game to soldiers in Iraq. And you thought that war had something to do with religion!

Then there's the red herring of this argument. Our nation holds some sort of patent on these mass shootings, yet these games and movies are available in other countries as well. Ever wonder why something might be released in Japan or the UK and then take a couple of months before we get it here? That's because they are cleaning it up, removing language, sexual content and violence. They have to censor it for Americans.

So with more violent games and movies appearing overseas, why don't we see the shootings over there like we do here? Sure, you can point to tougher gun laws, but I thought gun laws didn't work. So why is it Americans are so influenced by this kind of media, yet no one else in the world is? That's a serious question that should be asked of the NRA.

All Christie, the NRA and the right in general is doing here is creating a straw man. They hope we will take our focus off their promotion of looser gun regulations and more guns in society and place that focus where it isn't due. Hopefully we can have some logic surface, and more people will realize that blaming movies and video games just doesn't add up.

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Well, now, it's not exactly true that a president can't do something without the people behind him, is it? After all, the overwhelming majority of people who voted for the president wanted him to protect Social Security and Medicare and he's since done such a rapid pivot from his campaign speeches, I'm surprised his head didn't fly off! What he's done is devote himself to changing public opinion by every possible means -- which is what leaders are supposed to do, except in this case, for the wrong thing. But obviously, it can be done!

President Obama called the Dec. 14th shooting in Newtown, Connecticut “the worst day of my presidency,” and said during a rare interview on Meet The Press, that he will propose a package of reforms that will likely include new regulations on assault-rifles and high-capacity ammunition clips, and enhanced background checks for gun purchases. A commission headed by Vice President Joe Biden is currently drafting gun safety recommendations.

But Obama stressed that reform cannot happen without broad public support, suggesting that he will rally public opinion for sensible gun safety regulations or drop the effort if Americans are not on board.

Why? He didn't do that with the chained CPI, no matter how many polls showed people didn't want Social Security cuts. Instead, he's the Little Engine That Could. Toot, toot!

“We’re not going to get this done unless the American people decide it’s important and so this is not going to be a matter of me spending political capital. One of the things that you learn having now been in this office for four years. The old adage of Abraham Lincoln’s, ‘with public opinion there is nothing you can’t do and without public opinion there is very little you can get done in this town.’”

Obama also rejected the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) call for more guns in schools, arguing that “the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem.” He promised to listen to all sides of the gun debate before making any legislative recommendations.

“It is not enough for us to say, ‘This is too hard so we’re not going to try,’” Obama said. “So what I intend to do is I will call all the stakeholders together. I will meet with Republicans. I will meet with Democrats. I will talk to anybody. I think there are a vast majority of responsible gun owners out there who recognize that we can’t have a situation in which somebody with severe psychological problems is able to get the kind of high capacity weapons that this individual in Newtown obtained and gun down our kids. And, yes, it’s going to be hard.”

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This is very significant. In fact, it's downright historic: The politician sticking his neck out to buck the NRA about states having the right to ban guns is... Rick Perry. This is a real "Nixon goes to China" moment, because a conservative Republican (from rootin', tootin' Texas, no less) carries a lot more weight with NRA supporters. It's a damned shame that neither presidential candidate has, to date, had that kind of political courage, but maybe Perry's statement will open the door to an adult discussion:

In an interview concerning the tragic shooting on Texas A&M campus on Monday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) took a surprisingly moderate position on gun regulation. Although Perry rejected the suggestion that the shooting — the third high profile shooting in just one month — justified gun regulation in Texas, he also indicated that each state should be able to decide on its own whether or not to ban guns:

PERRY: When it gets back to this issue of taking guns away from law abiding citizens and somehow know this will make our country safer, I don’t agree with that. I think most people in Texas don’t agree with that, and that is a state by state issue frankly that should be decided in the states and not again a rush to Washington, D.C. to centralize the decision making, and them to decide what is in the best interest for the citizens and the people of Florida and Texas. That’s for the people of these states to decide.

Perry’s position, that each state should get to decide whether to “tak[e] guns away” from its citizens places him well to the left of the Supreme Court and the nation’s largest gun lobby. InMcDonald v. Chicago, the five conservative justices held that the Second Amendment applies equally to the federal government and to state governments, so an absolute ban on guns would not be constitutional if enacted at the state level (although bans on “dangerous and unusual” weapons would remain valid).

The National Rifle Association was the plaintiff in a sister case toMcDonald.Allowing each state to set its own gun policy, the position that Perry seems to embrace today, closely tracks the views expressed by dissenting Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor in McDonald.

The New York Daily News tells it like it is, but I doubt anyone in power is listening. Why not? Because as many Republicans are dictated to by Grover Norquist, politicians on both sides of the aisle grovel at the feet of Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association. Politicians rarely bother to try to explain the actual nuances of gun control, and how it isn't actually a plot to take away your hunting rifles. They almost never come out in support of even the mildest of gun control laws, no matter how many people are slaughtered.

The same people screaming about any attempt to control who gets to buy a gun are the same people demanding that anyone who tries to vote must first jump through numerous hoops. What a screwed-up nation we live in:

The police chief in Aurora, Colo., said he is confident that massacre gunman James Holmes acted alone. The police chief was dead wrong.

Standing at Holmes’ side as he unleashed an AR-15 assault rifle and a shotgun and a handgun was Wayne LaPierre, political enforcer of the National Rifle Association.

Standing at Holmes’ side as he sprayed bullets and buckshot into a crowded movie theater were Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, a President and a would-be President, who have bowed to the NRA’s dictates and who responded to the slaughter Friday with revolting, useless treacle.

Standing at Holmes’ side as he murdered 12 and wounded 59 were the millions of zealots who would sooner see blood flow and lives end than have to check a box on a gun registration form.

In a vain claim of innocence, the fanatics will say Holmes is a monster and a maniac, that he fired and fired and fired as a man possessed. Each protestation clamps their fingers with his around the trigger.

Because they made sure that virtually everyone, Holmes included, has unfettered legal access to heavy weaponry. And they made sure he was permitted by law to drive to the kill scene with a fully loaded arsenal.

Such is the conscienceless extremism of America’s gun lovers that they accept wholesale slaughter as akin to a fatal highway pileup. Accidents happen, in their grotesque view, and so do mass killings by firearms.

Lower death tolls — two, three, four, five — in offices, parks and restaurants slip from memory as awful but routine, cause for momentary pain and nothing more.

The day-to-day mayhem of street-crime shootings, responsible for more deaths than all the mass carnage combined, makes it to the police blotter, the courts, the newspapers, the emergency rooms and the cemeteries.

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If you ask the typical hyper-political gun owner (and I have … at Thanksgiving dinner), why it’s important to own a gun, they’ll bark about the Constitution. Yes, the Second Amendment: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed!”

This of course is the slogan the National Rifle Association adopted in the 1970’s. It was then that owning a gun became an absolute right endowed by God and the Constitution. A blessing passed down by our forefathers to obliterate game and protect our property. The NRA was founded in 1870 and for its first hundred years it was for gun control and didn’t mention the Second Amendment as their cause.

Adam Winkler points out in his delicious book, “Gun Fight,” what we call the “wild west” had some of the strictest gun control laws we’ve seen as a nation. The shoot out at the OK Corral took place, after all, because Wyatt Earp was trying to disarm the outlaw Cowboys in accordance with a Tombstone ordinance. The KKK was among other things, a gun control organization. They were trying to keep guns out of the hands of newly freed slaves … but still gun control.

The part of the Second Amendment omitted from the NRA’s slogan is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Yes, well regulated—it’s in the Constitution!

Now, to some, guns are as sacred as scripture. If you ask, again, this typical hyper-political gun owner why they need to stockpile assault rifles, you will get an answer much like Pat Flynn’s, a recent candidate for a Senate seat in Nebraska. "Really, we have our guns to protect ourselves against the government, number one," Flynn said in a debate right before the primary. "Hunting's number two. But protecting us against our government is number one." Remember Flynn was trying to land a job in the government (he didn’t win his party’s nomination, by the way).

The idea is that we have to be just as armed as our government in order to be safer or have more liberty (or something). The U.S. government has unmanned drones armed with supersonic laser-guided anti-armor Hellfire missiles, “bunker busters,” and nuclear weapons. Are far-right politicians saying we need civilians to have shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles “for protection?” Of course they’re not. They actually do want limits on ownership.

And if you ask the most vehement gun rights advocate why Everyman Gun Owner shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, I’d bet you’d get the same answer as to why we don’t want every country to have the capability: “Because they could get into the wrong hands.”

So weapons-grade plutonium should be limited. But the ever-handy semi-auto Glock pistol with a 30-round high-capacity magazine is an absolute right?

A recent gun buyback drive in Los Angeles resulted in someone turning in a rocket launcher. Comforting.

So we’re not actually talking about limited vs. unlimited. We are talking about degrees of weapon ownership.

Guns fall into the wrong hands all the time. More guns and fewer requirements for ownership doesn’t curb this. George Zimmerman was the wrong hands. Zimmerman, a Florida man now infamous for shooting an unarmed black teenager at close range after a 911 operator told him not to engage the alleged suspect and wait for police to arrive, is now being defended by said hyper-political gun owners. There’s no reason a Neighborhood Watch captain should be patrolling his block with a criminal record and a pistol. Zimmerman was a catastrophe realized. Even in the wake of new evidence about this case, the fact remains if Zimmerman didn’t have a gun, 16-year-old Trayvon Martin would be alive.

The United States is number one in the world in civilian gun ownership. And since we’re not last in gun violence (we’re the 14th highest in deaths—way higher in just injuries) it’s safe to assume that increasing the number of guns doesn’t decrease the number of gun deaths. Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.

So unless you think all Americans should get Daisy Cutters this Christmas—you believe in regulations as to who gets a weapon, what kind and where they can have it.

Gun control laws are not tyranny—as the family of Trayvon Martin can testify to—a de-regulated militia is.

The purpose of the Progressive Information Project is to more widely share resources and information created to advance progressive causes. A lot of good work is being done, but the average progressive often doesn't learn about it or know what is available. This series is designed to help alleviate that problem.

Attached is a spreadsheet that lists the amount of spending the National Rifle Association did in each of the states in the 2008 and 2010 cycles. In recent years, the NRA has spent lots of money trying to influence state legislatures to pass "Stand Your Ground," aka "Shoot First" or "Kill-at-Will" laws. Lobbyists like Marion Hammer in Florida write and try to pass these laws and once they are passed, they push for more extreme laws, like those that Hammer helped pass in Florida that prevents doctors from asking parents about guns in the home when examining the risks that children face.

The data in the spreadsheet could be correlated to the push for pro-gun laws in various states, although I haven't seen anyone who has done that work yet. The data includes:

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